Shunpei Yamazaki is the most prolific inventor in history, but you’ve probably never heard of him. He is 65, runs a research and development company—Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, in Atsugi, Japan—and holds 1,811 U.S. patents, nearly 700 more than Thomas Edison. This neatly dressed, polite, trumpet-voiced man, who comes across as something of a mystical seeker, attributes his success to six years under a mentor who taught him the “emotional spirit” of inventing. For Yamazaki and his peers, inventing is much more than just making money from intellectual properties; it’s anything from a compulsion to a calling. Invention is the engine of industry and the raison d’être of nearly every technology company. More than that, it advances civilization. Yet our greatest creators don’t have rock-star status. Oh, there’s Edison, the Elvis of inventors, and a thin sliver of society knows about contemporary pioneers like Dean Kamen, who created the Segway, and Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with envisioning the World Wide Web. But the most successful living exemplars have a Q rating somewhere below that of an extra in Gigli.

Inventors are undervalued but not without controversy. Nearly 90,000 U.S. patents were granted in 2006, up 50 percent from a decade ago—an explosion that has created a mess for some companies. Rampant legal fights over who devised what have become yet another cost of doing business, especially in the technology sector. Overwhelmed examiners sometimes grant questionable patents, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is so inundated that years can go by between submission and approval.

Despite the systemic muddle, anyone who ranks in Edison’s class has lived a remarkable life. I wanted to interview the top 10 living patent holders worldwide—ranked here in order of their number of U.S. patents—in the hope of gaining some insight into the creative spark behind invention. But first I had to find out who they are. Astoundingly, the patent office does not keep such a list. No one does. At the request of Condé Nast Portfolio, the Patent Board, a Chicago patent research and advisory firm, ran the query and came back with the names. (Granted, a tally of the number of patents does not necessarily identify the “greatest” inventors, just as book sales rarely reveal the finest writers. But such a list is the only objective measure we have.) These men—the group is all male—have rarely, if ever, talked to the media. During four months of phone calls and cajoling, I persuaded nine of the top inventors to agree—often reluctantly—to interviews.

Identifying them turned out to be easier than tracking them down. Two of the men do not work in the United States. Four are with a relatively small company, Micron Technologies of Boise, Idaho. Six, including Yamazaki and the four from Micron, work on computer chips. Missing from the list is George Spector, No. 4, who is apparently not an inventor at all. For decades, he ran a New York business that helped small-time inventors obtain patents for novelty innovations such as a motorized pot-washing tool. Spector then added his name to those patents, ultimately netting him 722.