It kinda did, right? Maybe, "invented" is to bold of a term, maybe there were others before. But, I've heard folk tales that Google has been running stuff in containers since the early to mid 2000s.
Google contributed cgroups to Linux, so saying that it invented Linux containers is a fair statement. Other operating systems had containers before Linux.
Not exactly. Google contributed the namespace support to Linux and IBM contributed much of the initial control group bits to Linux. Together, they form the modern "container" that we have all came to know and love.
would you consider "chroot" a form of container?
I was where I worked, with technology no one's heard of now, I doubt Google was then.