Showing 51 - 75 of 173 results
Mick Mountz
Mobile Robotic Material Handling for Order Fulfillment
Mick Mountz, Peter Wurman and Raffaello D’Andrea invented the Kiva system, a mobile robotic material handling system that has revolutionized order…
Ernst F. W. Alexanderson
High-Frequency Alternator
Ernst Alexanderson was the General Electric Company engineer whose high-frequency alternator gave America its start in the field of radio…
Maria Telkes
Solar Thermal Storage Systems
Maria Telkes was a highly respected innovator in solar energy. Throughout her career, she published widely on the topics of solar heating,…
Irving Langmuir
Incandescent Electric Lamp
Irving Langmuir's work led to two major inventions: the high-vacuum electron tube and the gas-filled incandescent lamp. Born in Brooklyn, New York,…
J. Presper Eckert
ENIAC
J. Presper Eckert was co-inventor of ENIAC, introduced to the public at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. ENIAC was considered a computer…
Theodore Harold Maiman
Laser
Physicist Theodore Harold Maiman invented the first operable laser. Born in Los Angeles, California, Maiman in his teens earned college money by…
Stanford R. Ovshinsky
Nickel-Metal Hydride Battery
Stanford Ovshinsky was a prolific, self-taught inventor and physicist whose pioneering work in multiple fields had an impact on many aspects of…
Samuel F. B. Morse
Telegraph
Samuel F.B. Morse, once a portrait painter, turned to inventing to make his fortune. Morse had little training in electricity but realized that…
Alois A. Langer
Implantable Heart Defibrillator
Alois A. Langer was the engineer on the medical team that invented the first automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). This device is…
Nikola Tesla
Electro-Magnetic Motor
Nikola Tesla invented the induction motor with rotating magnetic field that made unit drives for machines feasible and made AC power transmission an…
Kenneth C. Jordan
Radioisotopic Thermoelectric Generator (RTG)
Ken Jordan worked as a nuclear physicist at Monsanto's Mound Laboratory for 36 years, and in 1954, he and colleague John Birden invented the…
William B. Shockley
Transistor
William Shockley headed the team at Bell Telephone Laboratories that studied semiconductors and invented the transistor. The work that he and fellow…
Charles G. Page
High-Voltage Induction Coil
Charles Grafton Page invented the first high-voltage induction coil in 1836. The high-voltage induction coil became an important tool of scientific…
Eli Harari
Floating Gate EEPROM
Eli Harari invented the Floating Gate EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory). After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton University…
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…
Charles Sumner Tainter
Sound-Recording Instruments
Charles Tainter invented various sound-recording instruments, including an improved version of Thomas Edison's phonograph known as the graphophone,…
Edwin Howard Armstrong
FM Radio
The inventions of engineer Edwin Howard Armstrong were so important that to this day every radio or television set makes use of one or more of his…
Nick Holonyak, Jr.
LED
Nick Holonyak invented the first visible light-emitting diodes (LEDs), today commonly found in applications ranging from traffic lights to consumer…
Alonzo G. Decker
Portable Hand-Held Electric Drill
Virtually all of today’s electric drills descend from the original portable hand-held drill patented in 1917 by S. Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker,…
Louis W. Parker
Television Receiver
Louis W. Parker invented the intercarrier sound system for television sets, the modern basis for coordinating sound and picture. Born in Budapest,…
George de Mestral
VELCRO® Fasteners
In 1955, George de Mestral patented VELCRO® hook and loop fasteners, an efficient way to fasten fabrics and other materials. The idea came to him…
John Macdougall
Ion Implantation
John Macdougall is one of the inventors of the first commercially viable method of ion implantation, a process that changes the conductivity of areas…
David Huang
Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)
David Huang, James Fujimoto and Eric Swanson invented a revolutionary method for imaging the internal structures of body tissue with unprecedented…
Carl Auer von Welsbach
Incandescent Device
Carl Auer von Welsbach, an Austrian scientist and inventor, had a talent for discovering techniques for purifying rare earth elements and using these…
Claude Shannon
Pulse Code Modulation
Claude Shannon produced one of the great conceptual breakthroughs of his generation with the publication of his seminal work, "A Mathematical Theory…