This item was created by a contributor to eHistory prior to its affiliation with The Ohio State University. As such, it has not been reviewed for accuracy by the University and does not necessarily adhere to the University's scholarly standards. Skip to main content. You are here Home » Articles. Larry Gormley. It's no coincidence that some of the most famous inventors come from all walks of life.
Henry Ford was a savvy business entrepreneur. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, was a physical education teacher. But what they all had in common was an idea and a vision to deliver what they felt would make the world a better place.
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Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Mary Bellis. Inventions Expert. Mary Bellis covered inventions and inventors for ThoughtCo for 18 years.
She is known for her independent films and documentaries, including one about Alexander Graham Bell. Updated December 20, Featured Video. Changing the World It's no coincidence that some of the most famous inventors come from all walks of life. Cite this Article Format. Bellis, Mary.
History's 15 Most Popular Inventors. The first steam engine was actually his brainchild, just like a lot of other engineering marvels at that time. However, the engine was thought of as a toy rather than a practical invention.
As the steam moved up the tube and entered the sphere, the heat made the sphere move in a rotary motion. The sphere also had one or more small hollow tubes for the steam to escape. As simple as it might seem, it was the first practical implementation of transforming steam power into motion.
The invention of paper allowed humans to make notes and record history without spending too much money on silk, so it made the process of passing on knowledge to the next generation much more affordable.
However, it was the invention of the printing press that completely changed the world. One of the unique components of his design was the use of matrices to cast types with excellent accuracy and in large quantities. He also incorporated other elements already available for him such as oil-based ink, papermaking, bookbinding, and wine-making.
He started designing a new printing press in , and he managed to use it to print the famous Forty-two-line Bible by More than million books were printed using his printing presses by A Dutch astronomer, physicist, and mathematician, Christiaan Huygens was responsible for many important scientific discoveries including the wave theory of light, discovering the true shape of the ring of Saturn, and uncovering the science of dynamics action of forces on bodies.
His most popular invention was the practical application of the pendulum as a time controller in clocks. His pendulum clock came into existence in and the patent for it was granted a year later. Many consider Huygens a greatly-talented mathematician rather than a genius of the first order. Having a specialization in microscopy, the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is credited for discovering bacteria, blood cells, and all things microscopic.
His observation laid the foundation for modern fields of science including protozoology and biology. He made his own microscope using a high-quality lens with a short focal length. At that time, this design was preferable to a compound microscope because the former eliminated the problems with chromatic aberration.
Among them was the structure of the flea along with the entire history of metamorphosis. Benjamin Franklin was often illustrated as a man flying a kite in a thunderstorm, but this was not an original idea. A similar yet safer technique had been tried in France before.
Many of his other discoveries were original nonetheless. Benjamin Franklin, also one of the Founding Fathers, created a clear distinction between electricity conductors and insulators, invented a battery for storing electric power, demonstrated that electricity was a single fluid with equal amounts of positive and negative charges, and coined many new words such as electrify, charge, discharge, armature, condense, and conductor.
In , while repairing the Newcomen steam engine, James Watt was impressed not by the engine itself but by the waste of steam it made. It took him about a year to come up with an ingenious solution to improve the efficiency of the engine: a separate condenser. It was his first and greatest invention. Watt found that the worst defect of the Newcomen engine was the loss of latent heat in the process of creating energy. Therefore, the condensation — which caused the problem — should occur in a separate yet connected cylinder.
With the help of John Roebuck and a loan from Joseph Black, James Watt made his own engine in and was granted the patent for his all-new improved steam engine design, one which eventually became the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution a year later.
The Montgolfier brothers were French pioneers who developed and performed the first un-tethered flights in a hot-air balloon.
It all started in when the two discovered that heated air, collected inside a fabric bag, caused the bag to move up and fly. While it does sound simple, it took some serious work to figure out how to use it practically. Finally, they made the first flight in public on June 4, , in which they successfully flew up to 3, feet high and remained there for about 10 minutes.
They settled to the ground about one and a half miles away from where they took off. The original design was continuously refined and improved, which opened the possibility for scientists to explore the upper atmosphere. Alessandro Volta came up with the first true battery known as a voltaic pile. Volta started working on static electricity in and constructed the voltaic pile in The unit of electromotive force called a volt was derived from his name and coined in The automatic loom, the driving force behind the revolution in the textile industry, was the brainchild of the French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard.
He worked on the idea in and demonstrated his improved draw loom in It did take more than a decade, but only because his progress was cut short by the French Revolution during which he fought for the Revolutionaries.
Jacquard continued his work and ended up creating an attachment to make the loom even better in After which, any loom that used the attachment was called a Jacquard loom. One special thing about the Jacquard loom is its programmability.
Not only did it revolutionize the textile industry, but it also became one of the earliest versions of a programmable machine. In , the Jacquard loom was declared public property and the man who invented it was rewarded with royalties and a pension. In , when John Loudon McAdam held the position of surveyor general of the Bristol roads, he had the perfect opportunity to put his road-building ideas into practice.
Instead of utilizing the commonly-used masonry construction approach, he demonstrated that a thin layer of broken stones compacted on a well-drained natural formation could support traffic as long as the thin layer was covered by an impermeable surface of smaller stones. Drainage was crucial to make the design effective, so the pavement must be elevated above the surrounding surface.
Many other countries including the United States quickly adopted the same method; in fact, it is still used until today.
Since he was unable to obtain lithographic stone locally, he decided to find a method to acquire or provide the images automatically.
He started to use pewter covered with various light-sensitive materials to produce superimposed engravings in sunlight. In other words, the first photographic image from nature permanently fixed on a surface. He realized that metal was a better material of choice for etching because of its strength and durability.
In , he made another heliograph but this one was a reproduction of an engraved portrait. With this heliograph, not only did he solve the problem of reproducing nature by light but also invented a method of photomechanical reproduction. In the late s, Robert Fulton came up with the idea of using revolving paddles at the stern of a ship for effective propulsion based on an earlier invention of a mechanical paddle.
In addition to that, Fulton also designed a steam warship, submarine, and a system of inland waterways. His journey from being an experimental engineer to a commercially successful person started in when he met with Robert R. Livingston — the same Livingston who took part in drafting the U. Declaration of Independence. The boat was about 66 feet long and it housed an eight-horsepower engine. It is worth mentioning that Livingston had been in the steamboat navigation business in fact, he had a year monopoly in that before he was the minister to France.
Thanks to his partnership with Fulton, he continued to reign supreme in the business for quite some time afterward. Many people remember Eli Whitney as the inventor of the cotton gin, but his most important contribution to the entire manufacturing industry was the idea of mass production of interchangeable parts. He was an inventor, manufacturer, and an engineer who made a lot of money from the settlement of patent infringement issues regarding his patent on cotton gin.
Their device was all mechanical and consisted of 1 a hopper to feed the cotton into the gin; 2 a cylinder fitted with hundreds of short wire hooks arranged in a way that they matched the grooves; 3 breastwork with a narrow slot too small to allow the passage of cotton seeds; and 4 a bristle to brush the cotton from the hooks. The patent for this device was granted in So, he did what inventors do: he built one. It occurred to him that etching the rest of the surface transformed the markings into reliefs.
His works on copper plates were unsuccessful, but it led him to experiment on limestone. After two years of trial and error, he discovered flat-surface printing. Senefelder did not disclose his method to the public until at least The king of Bavaria also gave him a good pension.
Based on earlier models of rockets used by Hayder Ali an Indian prince in and , Sir William Congreve built a rocket with the capability of reaching a target located 2, yards away in The rocket was about Another idea of his was reinforcing warships with armor to withstand artillery fire. The device was constructed of hollow tubes of wood and it could only transmit sound to one ear. Despite the basic design, the stethoscope could be easily disassembled and reassembled partly because of the small dimension — it was 10 inches long and 1.
Rubber tubing replaced wood at the end of the 19 th century. He then built the Blucher , an engine equipped with enough power to haul 30 tons of coal at four miles per hour. Stephenson continued to improve the design and discovered a method to make a truly practical locomotive. The method involved redirecting exhaust steam up the chimney to increase the draft. It ran from Darlington to Stockton at the speed of 15 miles per hour carrying passengers.
Unfortunately, the exposure time required to produce decent quality images was about eight hours long. He used a combination of mercury vapor and table salt to expose a plate of iodized silver to make the process more time efficient without sacrificing picture quality. The image was permanent too.
Although the idea of the electric telegraph was invented around , Samuel F. Morse believed that his proposal was the first. In and with the help of a friend who provided the materials and labor for developing the proposal, Morse built a model of the telegraph system. A year later, he developed a system of language consisting of dots and dashes known today as the Morse code.
The code, however, remains a crucial system of communication especially for military purposes in situations when extremely long-distance communication is necessary. One of the main reasons is that receivers transmit simple tones in better clarity. Two things separated Charles Babbage from every other mathematician and engineer in his lifetime: the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine — both were his projects.
While the Difference Engine was the less sophisticated of the two, it could put any calculator available back then to shame. It was a glorified mechanical calculator with the ability to construct a mathematical table, more specifically logarithm tables for navigational purpose. The engine could also print results onto a soft metal plate. Between and , British scientists built the engine and you can still see it now at the Science Museum in London.
On the other hand, the Analytical Engine should have been the first computer. It had a mill CPU , storage to hold data prior to processing memory , reader, and printer. The postal service that we know today has remained pretty much the same since Sir Rowland Hill formulated it between and To simplify an otherwise complex pricing of postage based on distance and avoid refusal of payment upon delivery, he created a prepaid postage system in which a customer must purchase an adhesive stamp at the post office prior to sending a package or letter.
As an inventor of an effective rubber tire design and its manufacturing method, Charles Goodyear had an unfortunate life due to patent infringement. Goodyear figured out that a mixture of rubber, sulfur, and white lead could be transformed into an elastic solid that would remain elastic even when exposed to high temperature. The vulcanization process used by Goodyear generally remains the same as it is today. You can read about his account of the discovery in Gum-Elastic and Its Discoveries.
In his line of work as an apprentice to a blacksmith in Vermont when he was still in his early 20s, John Deere could tell that wood and a cast-iron plow was ineffective. It occurred to him that the answer was a one-piece share and moldboard made of all-steel material. By , Deere and his partner built and sold a small number of the improved plow. Nine years later, he decided to move to Moline, Illinois and it turned out to be the right decision.
Deere and Company are still headquartered in the same city; the company was th in Fortune list in His bullet design was conical, so it was longer but had more or less the same weight as its rounded counterparts. Another major component was the hollow base which expanded due to the pressure of an exploding charge.
During the U. In , when he was 15 years old, he wrote a music adaptation written with a simple instrument. Instead of writing it down in normal letters, he made a system that consisted of six-dot codes in various configurations to represent letters in the alphabet.
In other words, a written language system for the blind. He introduced the system in a treatise in but the adoption was quite slow, and Braille never saw his idea officially adopted for educational purposes.
Schools in Paris did not officially use the system until — two years after his death. A universal code for English-speaking Braille was approved in During the early 19 th century, harvesting crop was not always a pleasant time for farmers in the United States.
Harvesting required a lot of labor, and the cost to hire them would be far from being affordable. In , a young inventor named Cyrus Hall McCormick from Virginia built a mechanical reaper consisting of a vibrating cutting blade, a reel, and a platform to receive the falling grain.
Also resembling a two-wheeled chariot, the equipment introduced the working principles of modern grain-cutting machines. It was an award-winning invention and by , the reaper became known to farmers all around the world.
When working as a master mechanic in a bedstead factory in , Elisha Graves Otis was sent to New York to install a device called a safety hoist in a new factory.
He designed an elevator equipped with a clamping mechanism that would grip the guide rails on which the car moved in case the rope lost its tension.
He called it a safety hoist. In the following years, Otis improved his design and installed the first elevator for passenger use powered by steam in He also patented a steam plow in and a bake oven a year later.
During the Crimean War, Bessemer realized that blowing air through melted cast-iron could introduce more heat to the material and further purify it at the same time. The method also made the pouring process of purified iron much easier. The air could generate heat due to the chemical reactions from oxygen in the air with silicon and carbon in the iron.
Later on, the technique became known as the Bessemer process. He devised all sorts of equipment to make the process more effective including larger ingots and a tilting converter. One of the major problems was that the iron could contain dangerous levels of phosphorous substances. Robert Forester Mushet, an English metallurgist, came up with a process to remove such impurities by burning them off as much as possible, then introducing carbon and manganese at the next manufacturing step with the right amount of spiegeleisen.
Bessemer purchased the patent for it too. He was now capable of producing mild steel with better malleability to withstand more rolling and forging. Before Samuel Colt introduced his firearm design, revolvers required the shooter to line up a bullet chamber with the barrel, cock the hammer, and then pull the trigger.
While the mechanism was quite familiar, the shooter had to do each in a separate step. The cocking action was linked to the bullet chambers, so they automatically rotated.
He patented the design in France and England in and in the United States a year later. Until his U. As you have probably guessed by the name, Richard J. Gatling is best known as the man who brought the Gatling gun to existence. This was the earliest model of a machine gun. Instead of firing the bullets automatically, however, the gun was crank-operated. It consisted of 10 barrels, each of which was mechanically loaded and fired one time as the crank completed one full rotation.
A cartridge container was mounted directly above the actual gun; therefore, gravity had the reloading process covered.
The first-half of crank rotation loaded and fired the gun, and the second-half was when the mechanism ejected the spent cases. Gatling patented his invention in By the time the authorities approved official adoption of the gun, however, the civil war had practically ended. Among them were the use of solid rubber tires and wire-spoked wheels to smoothen the ride. They were so rough that people called them the boneshaker. In addition, Starley also invented the center-pivot steering design that he used in his second bike called the Ariel , featuring a inch front wheel and three-inch rear wheel.
Many historians consider it the first true bicycle. Ariel became the standard bicycle design for the next decade too. In , Starley built the Coventry tricycle and incorporated the patented use of a chain drive and differential gear. It was a highly successful model. Mostly recognized as the founder of the Noble Prizes, Alfred Bernhard Nobel had two other notable inventions: explosive detonation of nitroglycerin and dynamite.
During the late s, the most powerful yet relatively safe explosive for use in mines was the black powder. Nitroglycerin was known about at that time, but it was so powerful that nobody knew how to detonate it from a safe distance. In , Nobel invented a practical method of detonation by using a wooden stick inserted into a metal container filled with a large charge of nitroglycerin. The stick had a small charge of black powder intended to start a chain reaction that would eventually explode the entire container.
Just four years later, Nobel figured out a method to contain nitroglycerin in a more stable state. When exposed to a material known as kieselguhr a siliceous sedimentary rock , nitroglycerin was absorbed, and the resulting mixture became safer to handle. He was granted the patent for it in United States and Great Britain. The first practical form of artificial plastic was celluloid, of which the manufacturing process was discovered by John Wesley Hyatt.
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