PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: invention
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal....
American inventor
Thomas Edison was an American inventor who, singly or jointly, held a world-record 1,093 patents. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial research laboratory. Edison was the quintessential...
German astronomer
Johannes Kepler German astronomer who discovered three major laws of planetary motion, conventionally designated as follows: (1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; (2) the...
American industrialist
Henry Ford was an American industrialist who revolutionized factory production with his assembly-line methods. (Read Henry Ford’s 1926 Britannica essay on mass production.) Ford spent most of his life...
French chemist and microbiologist
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. Pasteur’s contributions to science, technology, and medicine are nearly without...
German scientist and philosopher
Hermann von Helmholtz was a German scientist and philosopher who made fundamental contributions to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology. He is best known for his statement...
Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician
Galileo was an Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the...
French philosopher and scientist
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s...
German physicist and philosopher
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist and philosopher who discovered (1925) a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics...
Greek mathematician
Archimedes was the most famous mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece. He is especially important for his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing...
Scottish engineer, mathematician, and physicist
William Thomson, Baron Kelvin was a Scottish engineer, mathematician, and physicist who profoundly influenced the scientific thought of his generation. Thomson, who was knighted and raised to the peerage...
English clergyman and scientist
Joseph Priestley was an English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist whose work contributed to advances in liberal political and religious thought and in experimental chemistry. He is...
British-German astronomer
William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer, the founder of sidereal astronomy for the systematic observation of the stars and nebulae beyond the solar system. He discovered the planet Uranus,...
British-American inventor
Alexander Graham Bell was an inventor, scientist, and teacher of the deaf whose foremost accomplishments, during a life lived in Canada and the United States, were the invention of the telephone (patented...
American engineer
Theodore von Kármán was a Hungarian-born American research engineer best known for his pioneering work in the use of mathematics and the basic sciences in aeronautics and astronautics. His laboratory at...
British mathematician and logician
Alan Turing was a British mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer...
American industrialist and inventor
George M. Pullman was an American industrialist and inventor of the Pullman sleeping car, a luxurious railroad coach designed for overnight travel. In 1894, workers at his Pullman’s Palace Car Company...
French military engineer
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban was a French military engineer who revolutionized the art of siege craft and defensive fortifications. He fought in all of France’s wars of Louis XIV’s reign (1643–1715)....
Italian physicist
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian physicist and inventor of a successful wireless telegraph, or radio (1896). In 1909 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he shared with German physicist Ferdinand...
American inventor
Robert Fulton was an American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine, and...
American rocket scientist and chemist
Jack Parsons was an American rocket scientist and chemist who made significant contributions to the development of rocket technology and missile systems and was a cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory...
German mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician, generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time for his contributions to number theory, geometry, probability theory, geodesy, planetary...
British chemist
Sir Humphry Davy was an English chemist who discovered several chemical elements (including sodium and potassium) and compounds, invented the miner’s safety lamp, and became one of the greatest exponents...
Scottish inventor
James Watt was a Scottish instrument maker and inventor whose steam engine contributed substantially to the Industrial Revolution. Watt was also known for patenting the double-acting engine and an early...
American chemist
Irving Langmuir was an American physical chemist who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.” He was the second American and the first...
Swedish inventor
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist who invented dynamite and other more powerful explosives and who also founded the Nobel Prizes. Alfred Nobel was the fourth son of Immanuel...
German printer
Johannes Gutenberg was a German craftsman and inventor who originated a method of printing from movable type. Elements of his invention are thought to have included a metal alloy that could melt readily...
Polish-born French physicist
Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903...
American engineer
Igor Sikorsky was a pioneer in aircraft design who is best known for his successful development of the helicopter. Sikorsky’s father was a physician and professor of psychology. His mother also was a physician...
American artist and inventor
Samuel F.B. Morse was an American painter and inventor who developed an electric telegraph (1832–35). In 1838 he and his friend Alfred Vail developed the Morse Code. He was the son of the distinguished...
American engineer
James B. Eads was an American engineer best known for his triple-arch steel bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Mo. (1874). Another project provided a year-round navigation channel for New...
Dutch scientist and mathematician
Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, who founded the wave theory of light, discovered the true shape of the rings of Saturn, and made original contributions to the science...
Serbian-American inventor
Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He also developed the three-phase system...
German-born American engineer
Wernher von Braun was a German engineer who played a prominent role in all aspects of rocketry and space exploration, first in Germany and after World War II in the United States. Braun was born into a...
Hungarian-born American physicist
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who participated in the production of the first atomic bomb (1945) and who led the development of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the...
American engineer
Charles Stark Draper was an American aeronautical engineer, educator, and science administrator. Draper’s laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was a centre for the design of navigational...
American engineer, architect, and futurist
R. Buckminster Fuller was an American engineer, architect, and futurist who developed the geodesic dome—the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure and the only practical...
American inventor
Lee de Forest was an American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems...
British scientist
William Hyde Wollaston was a British scientist who enhanced the techniques of powder metallurgy to become the first to produce and market pure, malleable platinum. He also made fundamental discoveries...
American professor and inventor
Robert Goddard was an American professor and inventor generally acknowledged to be the father of modern rocketry. He published his classic treatise, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in 1919. Goddard...
American inventor
Garrett Morgan was an American entrepreneur, inventor, and activist known for his safety innovations in the early 20th century, especially a protective hood that was a forerunner of the modern gas mask...
French physician
René Laënnec was a French physician who invented the stethoscope and perfected the art of auditory examination of the chest cavity. When Laënnec was five years old, his mother, Michelle Félicité Guesdon,...
American inventor and manufacturer
Eli Whitney was an American inventor, mechanical engineer, and manufacturer, often hailed as “father of American technology.” He is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin but most importantly...
Swedish scientist
V. Walfrid Ekman was a Swedish physical oceanographer best known for his studies of the dynamics of ocean currents. The common oceanographic terms Ekman layer, denoting certain oceanic or atmospheric layers...
English engineer
Richard Trevithick was a British mechanical engineer and inventor who successfully harnessed high-pressure steam and constructed the world’s first steam railway locomotive (1803). In 1805, he adapted his...
English astronomer
Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet was an English astronomer and successor to his father, Sir William Herschel, in the field of stellar and nebular observation and discovery. An only child, John was educated...
Canadian scientist
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was a Canadian radio pioneer who on Christmas Eve in 1906 broadcast the first program of music and voice ever transmitted over long distances. The son of an Anglican minister,...
English inventor and engineer
Henry Bessemer was an inventor and engineer who developed the first process for manufacturing steel inexpensively (1856), leading to the development of the Bessemer converter. He was knighted in 1879....
American inventor
Philo Farnsworth was an American inventor who developed the first all-electronic television system. Farnsworth was a technical prodigy from an early age. An avid reader of science magazines as a teenager,...
English chemist, doctor, and author
James Lovelock was an English chemist, medical doctor, scientific instrument developer, and author best known for the creation and promulgation of the Gaia hypothesis, an idea rooted in the notion that...