Someone should write a sci-fi short story about this:
Maria Templeton is commonly credited with inventing the time machine. MacAfee Black, a time-machine technician who lived before this myth had been disproven*, wanted to meet the now-dead inventor, traveled back to when she would have started working on it. Turns out, she had no designs for anything of the sort, but after MacAfee basically blurted out how it all worked, she managed to build one.
Nowadays, technologies that nobody actually came up with are pretty common. And they all seem to be moving society in the same direction.
* Time machines can move you backward, not forward, because time travel that goes both ways is utterly story-breaking.