Eggs Benedict has three origin stories, three different Benedicts, and no clean way to choose between them.
The famous version credits Lemuel Benedict, a Wall Street stockbroker. In 1894, as the story goes, he walked into the old Waldorf Hotel in New York with a hangover and ordered buttered toast, crisp bacon, poached eggs and hollandaise sauce. The hotel's maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, liked the combination. In this account he added it to the menu, swapping the toast for an English muffin and the bacon for ham or Canadian bacon.
The weak point is timing. The earliest print source cited for this version is a New Yorker piece of 19 December 1942. It opens "Forty-eight years ago, Lemuel Benedict came into the dining room of the old Waldorf." That is nearly half a century after the event, and the accounts cited here point to no record from 1894 itself. Merriam-Webster goes further and calls the 1894 date impossible, because the dish was already known by that name in California in late 1893. Its earliest example is a short story in the Overland Monthly of January 1894, set in a San Francisco club, which mentions "eggs a la Benedict." The 1942 account also says Benedict's order was toast, not a muffin.
A second theory points to Delmonico's, the New York restaurant where Tschirky had worked before the Waldorf. In this telling, which is Delmonico's own, the chef Charles Ranhofer created the dish in the 1860s for regular patrons Mr. and Mrs. LeGrand Benedict, who wanted something new. The evidence offered is Ranhofer's 1894 cookbook The Epicurean, which has a recipe spelled "Eggs à la Benedick" that closely matches the modern dish. Whether it was in the first printing is debated. The different spelling and the gap between 1860 and 1894 leave open who, if anyone, it was named for.
A third claim names Elias Cornelius Benedict, a banker and yachtsman known as "Commodore" Benedict. It rests on a 1967 New York Times article by Craig Claiborne, which relied on a letter from a man named Edward P. Montgomery. No date or source is given, and Chowhound calls it the weakest of the three.
One more clue complicates the Waldorf story. Tschirky's 1896 cookbook has no obvious eggs Benedict. Its closest relative is a recipe called "Philadelphia Eggs," with cold chicken on a toasted muffin, poached eggs and hollandaise.
The honest summary is that all three tales put the dish in 1860s to 1890s New York, and none is documented at the time. The evidence does not settle which Benedict, if any, the dish was named for. The Waldorf story is the best told, not the best proven.