Showing 1 - 25 of 80 results
Elias Howe
Sewing Machine
Elias Howe invented the first practical sewing machine. Born in Spencer, Massachusetts, he spent his childhood and early adult years in Massachusetts…
Gideon Sundback
Modern Zipper
Swedish-born engineer Gideon Sundback improved on Whitcomb Judson's work, making the zipper practical and commercially successful. Today, thousands…
Henry Ford
Transmission Mechanism
Pioneering automotive engineer Henry Ford held many patents on automotive mechanisms. He is best remembered, however, for helping devise the factory…
Rebecca Richards-Kortum
Medical Devices for Low-Resource Settings
Rebecca Richards-Kortum develops low-cost, high-performance medical technologies for poor communities where standard medical equipment isn't an…
Radia Perlman
Robust Network Routing and Bridging
Radia Perlman has played a major role in driving the growth and development of the internet. Her best-known contribution is the Spanning Tree…
Lloyd Augustus Hall
Food Preservatives
Lloyd Hall was a pioneer in the field of food chemistry, creating many of the preservative chemicals that are now used to keep food fresh without…
Emmanuelle Charpentier
CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing
Microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and biochemist Jennifer Doudna co-invented the gene-editing system CRISPR-Cas9, a versatile technology for…
Ming-Jun Li
Bend-Insensitive Optical Fiber
Ming-Jun Li, Dana Bookbinder and Pushkar Tandon invented bend-insensitive optical fiber. This technology can bend without causing significant signal…
Mary-Dell Chilton
Transgenic Plant
Mary-Dell Chilton is one of the founders of modern plant biotechnology. She led the research team that produced the first transgenic, or genetically…
Philippe Horvath
CRISPR-Enhanced Food Products
Molecular biologists Philippe Horvath and Rodolphe Barrangou discovered that CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and…
Jan Ernst Matzeliger
Shoe-Lasting Machine
Jan Matzeliger invented the automatic shoe-lasting machine, mechanizing the complex process of joining a shoe sole to its upper, and revolutionizing…
Barney Graham
Structure-Based Vaccine Design
Immunologist and virologist Barney Graham and structural biologist Jason McLellan used structure-based vaccine design to stabilize and modify surface…
Virginia Norwood
Multispectral Scanner
Virginia Norwood invented the Multispectral Scanner (MSS), the first in a series of satellite-based instruments that have been continuously imaging…
Margaret E. Knight
Machine for Making Flat-Bottom Paper Bags
Margaret Knight invented a machine that could automatically cut, fold and glue flat-bottomed paper bags. Her revolutionary invention enabled the mass…
Norbert Rillieux
Automated Sugar Refining
Considered one of the earliest chemical engineers, Norbert Rillieux revolutionized the sugar industry when he invented a refining process,…
David Crosthwait
Heating and Ventilation System Design
David Crosthwait was a pioneer in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) industry. He devoted his career, which included groundbreaking…
Stanley N. Cohen
Genetic Engineering
In 1973, Stan Cohen and Herb Boyer worked together to understand how genes work and ended up proving that DNA cloning was feasible. Their experiments…
Percy Lavon Julian
Preparation of Cortisone
Percy Lavon Julian synthesized physostigmine for treatment of glaucoma and cortisone for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. He is also noted for…
William Seward Burroughs
Calculator
William Seward Burroughs invented the first practical adding and listing machine. Born in Rochester, New York, Burroughs began his career as a bank…
Thomas A. Watson
Improvements to the Telephone
Thomas Watson is best known for working as Alexander Graham Bell's assistant during the development of the telephone. It was Watson who heard the…
Felix Hoffmann
Aspirin
Felix Hoffmann first made acetylsalicylic acid, better known today as aspirin, to ease his father's arthritis. However, aspirin's history begins long…
Thomas Blanchard
Pattern Lathe
Thomas Blanchard devised a machine that transformed gun manufacturing and made the production of many other products faster and less expensive.…
James Fujimoto
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)
James Fujimoto, David Huang and Eric Swanson invented optical coherence tomography (OCT), a method for imaging subsurface structure in biological…
Howard Aiken
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Mark I)
With the Mark I calculator, Howard Aiken showed that a computer could provide high-powered, speedy mathematical solutions to many problems. Aiken…
Patsy O. Sherman
Scotchgard™ Textile Protector
Chemist Patsy Sherman and colleague Sam Smith were working at 3M Company when they created Scotchgard™. Scotchgard went on to become one of the most…