Transistors

[ppppenguin]

What about Bill Gates? A uni drop out who did his own thing and came up with Microsoft.

There are many people with cherished theories and ideas. Very very few are the next Bill Gates or Albert Einstein. Yes, he was a bit of laggard at school too. I know a guy, a respected medical research scientist, who happens to have ideas that have been dismissed by the establishment. I really don't know if he's on to something important or whether it's just another crackpot theory. Maybe years after his death somebody will see his papers and make a breakthrough based on his theories. More likely they will be forgotten.

Some ideas survive and grow. Such as tectonic plate theory which went from crackpot to orthodoxy over a few decades. Some are hardy survivors, such as Lamarck's work on evolution. Although most think it wrong and it's done serious damage (read about Lysenko in the USSR) there's a bit of it that just won't go away. One word: epigenetics.

There are many dropouts from the system. Most of them are just that and no more.

There's a good piece of fiction writing about a scientist with a crackpot idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Highway
In the novel he was proven correct. In real life he was very nearly right too, albeit for the wrong reasons. Recommended reading.