Showing 1 - 25 of 88 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…
Martha Coston
Signal Flares Used by Ships
Martha Coston invented a system of pyrotechnic signal flares that not only gave the U.S. Navy a great advantage in communication during the Civil War…
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,…
Frederic Eugene Ives
Color Photography
Frederic Ives was a pioneer of color and stereoscopic photography, and demonstrated a system of natural color photography at the 1885 Novelties…
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…
William Nebergall
Stannous Fluoride Toothpaste
Dentist and biochemist Joseph Muhler and inorganic chemist William Nebergall developed a cavity-preventing product using stannous fluoride, building…
Ambrose Swasey
Telescope
Ambrose Swasey, inventor of precise astronomical instruments, designed some of the most powerful and accurate telescopes of his day.Swasey was born…
Dawon Kahng
MOSFET
Dawon Kahng was an inventor of the first practical field-effect transistor, a device that controls electronic signals by switching them on or off or…
Marvin Caruthers
Chemical Synthesis of DNA
In the early 1980s, biochemist Marvin Caruthers and his team at the University of Colorado Boulder developed the methods for chemically synthesizing…
Aran Safir
Iris Recognition System
Aran Safir and Leonard Flom worked together in the 1980s on their concept for an iris identification system. They based their work on the fact that…
Andrea Goldsmith
Adaptive Beamforming for Multi-Antenna Wi-Fi
Andrea Goldsmith created technical innovations including adaptive beamforming for multi-antenna Wi-Fi. Her work has shaped the performance of…
Helen Blanchard
Zig-Zag Sewing Machine
Helen Blanchard invented the zig-zag sewing machine. By making significant improvements to existing machine designs, Blanchard’s work enabled the…