PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: invention
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci, (Italian: “Leonardo from Vinci”) Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the...
American inventor
Thomas Edison, 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 American...
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...
Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician
Galileo, 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 scientific...
American industrialist
Henry Ford, 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 making...
French chemist and microbiologist
Louis Pasteur, 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 precedent....
French philosopher and scientist
Blaise Pascal, 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 principle...
German scientist and philosopher
Hermann von Helmholtz, German scientist and philosopher who made fundamental contributions to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology. He is best known for his statement of the...
German physicist and philosopher
Werner Heisenberg, 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 for 1932....
Greek mathematician
Archimedes, the most famous mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece. Archimedes 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, Scottish engineer, mathematician, and physicist who profoundly influenced the scientific thought of his generation. Thomson, who was knighted and raised to the peerage in...
English clergyman and scientist
Joseph Priestley, English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist whose work contributed to advances in liberal political and religious thought and in experimental chemistry. He is best remembered...
American inventor
Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and teacher of the deaf whose foremost accomplishments were the invention of the telephone (1876) and the refinement of the phonograph...
British-German astronomer
William Herschel, 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, hypothesized...
British mathematician and logician
Alan Turing, 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 science,...
American engineer
Theodore von Kármán, 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 the...
American inventor
Robert Fulton, 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 a steam...
American industrialist and inventor
George M. Pullman, 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 initiated...
Polish-born French physicist
Marie Curie, 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 Nobel...
French military engineer
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, 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). Vauban...
American chemist
Irving Langmuir, 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 industrial...
Italian physicist
Guglielmo Marconi, 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 Braun....
Scottish inventor
James Watt, 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 steam...
German mathematician
Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time for his contributions to number theory, geometry, probability theory, geodesy, planetary...
Swedish inventor
Alfred Nobel, 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 and...
British chemist
Sir Humphry Davy, 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 of...
German-born American engineer
Wernher von Braun, 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 prosperous...
naturalized American engineer
Igor Sikorsky, 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...
German printer
Johannes Gutenberg, 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 and...
American engineer, architect, and futurist
R. Buckminster Fuller, 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...
Dutch scientist and mathematician
Christiaan Huygens, 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...
American physicist
Edward Teller, 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 hydrogen...
American engineer
James B. Eads, 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 Orleans...
American artist and inventor
Samuel F.B. Morse, 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 geographer...
Serbian-American inventor
Nikola Tesla, 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 of...
American engineer
Charles Stark Draper, 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 professor and inventor
Robert Goddard, 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 was...
American inventor
Lee de Forest, 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 before...
French physician
René Laënnec, 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, died...
English astronomer
Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet, 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 briefly...
English radio astronomer
Sir Bernard Lovell, English radio astronomer, founder and director (1951–81) of England’s Jodrell Bank Experimental Station (now Jodrell Bank Observatory). Lovell attended the University of Bristol, from...
English engineer
Richard Trevithick, 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 high-pressure...
Swedish scientist
V. Walfrid Ekman, 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...
British scientist
William Hyde Wollaston, 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 in many...
English chemist, doctor, and author
James Lovelock, 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 all life...
American engineer
Charles Proteus Steinmetz, German-born American electrical engineer whose ideas on alternating current systems helped inaugurate the electrical era in the United States. At birth Steinmetz was afflicted...
Canadian scientist
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, 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, Fessenden...
American inventor
Philo Farnsworth, 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, he...
American inventor
Edwin H. Armstrong, American inventor who laid the foundation for much of modern radio and electronic circuitry, including the regenerative and superheterodyne circuits and the frequency modulation (FM)...
British scientist
Lord Rayleigh, English physical scientist who made fundamental discoveries in the fields of acoustics and optics that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He received the Nobel Prize...