- Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11 1847 - October 18 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, …
- Henry Ford
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 - April 7, 1947) was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. As sole owner of the Ford Company he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world.
- Richard Drew
Richard G. Drew was an American inventor who worked for 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he invented masking tape and cellophane tape. When Drew joined 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1923, it was a modest manufacturer of sandpaper. While testing their new "Wetordry" sandpaper at auto shops, Drew was intrigued to learn that the two-tone auto paintjobs so popular in the Roaring Twenties were difficult to manage at the border between the two colors.
- Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell (3 March 1847 - 2 August 1922) was a scientist, inventor, and innovator. Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, he emigrated to Canada in 1870, and then to the United States in 1871, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1882. Bell was awarded the U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876; although other inventors had claimed the honor, the Bell patent remained in effect.
- Charles Stark Draper
Charles Stark Draper, Sc.D. is often referred to as "the father of inertial navigation." Born in Windsor, Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri in 1917, Stanford University, California in 1919, and MIT in 1922. While at MIT, he earned an S.B. in electrochemical engineering in 1926, and an S.M. and Sc.D. in physics in 1928 and 1938 respectively. While at MIT, he founded the Instrumentation Laboratory in the 1930s, …
- George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver saved the South from an economic crisis and possible famine by inventing more than three hundred uses for the peanut, over one hundred uses from the sweet potato, around 75 uses from the pecan and many more from Georgia clay. The new products from those soil-enriching plants allowed Carver to convince Southern farmers to rotate their crops instead of relying entirely on cotton--which was destroying soil and consequently plantations across the region.
- Steve Wozniak
Dr. Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11 1950 in San Jose, California) is a U.S. computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, …
- Jack Kilby
Jack Kilby , an engineer with a background in ceramic-based silk screen circuit boards and transistor-based hearing aids, started working for Texas Instruments in 1958.
- Dean Kamen
Dean L. Kamen (born April 5, 1951) is an American entrepreneur and inventor. Born in Rockville Centre, New York, he attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but dropped out before graduating. His father is Jack Kamen, an illustrator of "Weird Science" and other EC Comics.
- Les Paul
Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss on June 9 1915) is an American jazz guitarist and inventor. He is one of the most important figures in the development of modern electric musical instruments and recording techniques. He is a pioneer in the development of the solid-body electric guitar (the Gibson Les Paul, which he helped design, is one of the most famous and enduring models), multitrack recording, and various reverberation and echo effects.
- Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney was an American inventor.
- Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatia, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
- Nils Bohlin
Nils Ivar Bohlin was a Swedish inventor who invented the three-point safety belt while working at Volvo. Born in Härnösand, Sweden, he received a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Härnösand Läroverk in 1939. In 1942, he started working for the aircraft maker Saab as an aircraft designer and helped develop ejection seats. In 1958, he joined Volvo as a safety engineer. He retired in 1985. In 1999, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
- George Eastman
George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. The roll film was also the basis for the invention of the motion picture film in 1888 by world's first filmmaker, Louis Le Prince, and a decade later by his followers Léon Bouly, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès. <sup></sup
- Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur (December 27 1822 - September 28 1895) was a French chemist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in microbiology. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He is best known to the general public for showing how to stop milk and wine from going sour - this process came to be called "pasteurization".
- Charles Goodyear
Charles Spencer Goodyear (December 29, 1800 - July 1, 1860) was the first American to vulcanize rubber, a process which he discovered in 1839 and patented on June 15, 1844. Although Goodyear is often credited with its invention, modern evidence has proven that the Mesoamericans used stabilized rubber for balls and other objects as early as 1600 BC. Goodyear discovered the vulcanization process accidentally after five years of research.
- John Bardeen
John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to have won two Nobel prizes in physics: in 1956 for the transistor, along with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Brattain, and in 1972 for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity together with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, now called BCS theory.
- Edward Goodrich Acheson
Edward Goodrich Acheson (March 9, 1856 - July 6, 1931) was an American chemist. Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, he was the inventor of carborundum, and later a manufacturer of carborundum and graphite. Thomas Edison put him to work on September 12, 1880 at his Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratory under John Kruesi. Acheson experimented on making a conducting carbon that Edison could use in his electric light bulbs.
- Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (September 29, 1901 - November 28, 1954) was an Italian physicist most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, particle physics and statistical mechanics. Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity.
- Mark Dean
Mark Dean (born March 2, 1957) is an inventor and a computer scientist. He holds three of the nine original IBM patents upon which personal computers were based. He led the team that developed the ISA bus, and he led the design team responsible for creating the first one-gigahertz computer processor chip. Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, Dean holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, …
- Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi [gue:lmo mar'ko:ni] (25 April 1874 - 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor, best known for his development of a radiotelegraph system, which served as the foundation for the establishment of numerous affiliated companies worldwide. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
- Robert Noyce
Robert Noyce, Ph.D. (December 12, 1927 - June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip although Kilby's invention was 6 months earlier. Noyce was born in Burlington, Iowa.
- Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 - June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex-seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. A leading figure in the development of the military-industrial complex and the military funding of science in the United States, …
- Paul Baran
Paul Baran (born April 29, 1926) was one of the developers of packet-switched networks along with Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock. He was born in Poland, but his family moved to Boston in 1928. Baran did undergraduate work at Drexel University, obtained his Masters degree in Engineering from UCLA in 1959 and began working for the RAND Corporation in the same year.
- Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced:) (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity, and futurism.
- John Deere
John Deere (February 7, 1804 - May 17, 1886) was an American blacksmith and manufacturer who founded Deere & Company- the largest agricultural and construction equipment manufacturers in the world.
- Stephanie Louise Kwolek
Stephanie Kwolek was born on July 31, 1923 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania to John and Nellie Zajdel Kwolek . Stephanie's father died when she was 10, and her mother obtained a job with the Aluminum Company of America to support Stephanie and her brother. Kwolek enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (the women's college of what is now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh in 1942, graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1946.
- Alfred Nobel
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. He owned Bofors, a major armaments manufacturer, which he had redirected from its previous role as an iron and steel mill. In his last will, he used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element Nobelium was named after him.
- Gordon Gould
Gordon Gould was an American physicist who is widely (but not universally) credited as the inventor of the laser. He is best known for his thirty-year fight with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain patents for the laser and related technologies, and his court battles with laser manufacturers to enforce the patents he obtained.
- Peter Mansfield
Sir Peter Mansfield, FRS, (born 9 October 1933), is a British physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The Nobel Prize was shared with Paul Lauterbur, who also contributed to the development of MRI. Sir Peter is a professor at the University of Nottingham. The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952, which went to Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, …
- Carl Djerassi
Carl Djerassi, is a chemist, novelist, and playwright best known for his contribution to the development of the first oral contraceptive pill (OCP). He participated in the invention in 1951, together with Mexican Luis E. Miramontes and Hungarian George Rosenkranz, of the progestin norethindrone—which, unlike progesterone, remained effective when taken orally and was far stronger than the naturally occurring hormone.
- Paul Lauterbur
Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible. Born and raised in Sidney, Ohio, Lauterbur graduated from Sidney High School, where a new Chemistry, Physics, and Biology wing was dedicated in his honor.
- Percy Lavon Julian
Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 - April 19, 1975) was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine, and his chemical synthesis of human steroids from plant steroid precursors would lay the foundation for the birth control pill and cortisone. He later started his own company synthesizing steroid intermediates from the Mexican yam.
- Elijah McCoy
Elijah J. McCoy(May 2 1843 - October 10, 1929) was a Afro-Canadian inventor. McCoy had wanted to work as an engineer but was repeatedly frustrated in this goal due to racial discrimination. After studying engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland, and returning home to Canada, he found work as a fireman and oiler at the Michigan Central Railroad. Working in a home-based machine shop in Ypsilanti, McCoy invented an automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives, …
- Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 - February 24, 2001), an American electrical engineer and mathematician, has been called "the father of information theory", and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory.
- George de Mestral
George de Mestral was an electrical engineer who invented Velcro. Born in Nyon, between Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, De Mestral designed a toy airplane at age twelve and patented it. He attended the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. After graduation he worked in the machine shop of an engineering company. In his spare time he was an amateur mountaineer, and while he was enjoying the outdoors, burrs often got stuck to his wool hunting pants and his dog's fur.
- Elias Howe
Elias Howe was an American inventor and sewing machine pioneer. He was born in Spencer, Massachusetts. Contrary to popular belief, he did not invent the sewing machine. Many other people, including Walter Hunt, had worked on the idea of such a machine before him. However, Howe refined the others' ideas into a functional machine. On September 10, 1846, he was awarded the first United States patent for a sewing machine using a lock stitch design.
- William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 - August 12, 1989) was a British-born American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s led to California's "Silicon Valley" becoming a hotbed of electronics innovation.
- Wilson Greatbatch
Wilson Greatbatch (born September 6 1919) is an inventor who advanced the development of early implantable cardiac pacemakers. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University at Buffalo. Greatbatch is often miscredited as the inventor of the pacemaker as a whole.
- Ray Dolby
Ray Dolby is the American inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He is the founder and chairman of Dolby Laboratories. Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon in 1933 and raised in San Francisco. As a teenager he held part-time and summer jobs at Ampex, working with their first audio tape recorder in 1949. While at Stanford University from 1953–57, Dolby continued at Ampex, …