Alexander Graham Bell is best known for his invention of the telephone, for which he received his first patent in 1876. Despite the hundreds of lawsuits that would challenge his claim to the invention, none would prove successful. Born in Scotland and later becoming a U.S. ...read more
When a commoner named Liu Bang became the first emperor of the Han Dynasty in 206 B.C., it was the start of a period of more than 400 years that was marked by advances in everything from record-keeping to agriculture to health care. “There were major inventions and developments ...read more
Inventions through history have often made everyday tasks easier and some, like trains, the cotton gin, printing press, and computers, have been revolutionary. But other inventions have backfired and proven to be detrimental in the long run. Among those who contributed some of ...read more
While World War I redrew political borders and introduced modern weaponry such as poison gas, machine guns and tanks, it also spurred the development of practical innovations. From Pilates to Kleenex to drones, these World War I innovations now permeate everyday ...read more
After Nikola Tesla was found dead in January 1943 in his hotel room in New York City, representatives of the U.S. government’s Office of Alien Property seized many documents relating to the brilliant and prolific 86-year-old inventor’s work. It was the height of World War II, and ...read more
1. Abraham Lincoln Thomas Jefferson usually gets credited as America’s inventor-in-chief, but Abraham Lincoln is the only president to hold a U.S. patent. In 1849, shortly after the end of his lone term as a U.S. congressman, the Great Emancipator was issued U.S. Patent No. ...read more
The centerpiece of today’s modern bathroom, the flush toilet has equal roots in ancient sanitation practices, Elizabethan politics and Industrial Revolution know-how. Primitive latrines that utilized a constant stream of water to carry away waste date back at least 5,000 years, ...read more
After his father, Antoine, a well-known portrait painter turned photographer, opened a small business in photographic plates based in Lyons, Louis Lumière began experimenting with the equipment his father was manufacturing. In 1881, 17-year-old Louis invented a new “dry plate” ...read more
Although elevators may seem like a modern invention, devices used to transport people or goods vertically have been around for thousands of years. According to the writings of Vitruvius, the Greek mathematician Archimedes created a primitive elevator in 236 B.C. that was operated ...read more
Born in Maffersdorf, Austria in 1875, Ferdinand Porsche was expected to become a craftsman like his father, a master tinsmith. Instead, he developed a passion for the field of electricity, and went to Vienna in 1893 to apprentice at an electrical engineering firm. He quickly rose ...read more
Bertha Ringer Benz, the daughter of a wealthy family from the southwestern German town of Pforzheim, had come to her husband’s aid before. Two years before the couple’s 1872 wedding she had used part of her dowry to help prop up the failing iron construction company Karl Benz ...read more
1. Morse had an earlier career as an accomplished painter. The son of a Calvinist preacher, Massachusetts-born Samuel F. B. Morse studied philosophy and mathematics at Yale University before turning his attention to the arts, eventually travelling to England in 1811 to study ...read more
1. The Printing Press Prior to the rise of the Internet, no innovation did more for the spread and democratization of knowledge than Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press. Developed around 1440 in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg’s machine improved on already existing presses through the ...read more
Looking for an innovative dental hygiene enthusiast to thank next time you polish your pearly whites? Turns out it’s not that simple. People have been cleaning their teeth for millennia, starting with the ancient Egyptians, who are thought to have scrubbed their choppers with a ...read more
Unlike technologies such as the light bulb or the telephone, the internet has no single “inventor.” Instead, it has evolved over time. The internet got its start in the United States more than 50 years ago as a government weapon in the Cold War. For years, scientists and ...read more
The American inventor announces his invention of the phonograph, a way to record and play back sound. Edison stumbled on one of his great inventions–the phonograph–while working on a way to record telephone communication at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His work led ...read more
Thomas Alva Edison, one of the most prolific inventors in history, dies in West Orange, New Jersey, at the age of 84. Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Edison received little formal schooling, which was customary for most Americans at the time. He developed serious hearing problems ...read more
In a demonstration witnessed by members of Congress, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse dispatches a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland. The message–“What Hath God Wrought?”–was telegraphed back to the Capitol a ...read more
The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late 1800s, though Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that became standard, and Ford, ...read more
Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message–simply the Morse-code ...read more
In the first public demonstration of his incandescent lightbulb, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison lights up a street in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company ran special trains to Menlo Park on the day of the demonstration in response to public enthusiasm ...read more
On January 26, 1926, John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor, gives the first public demonstration of a true television system in London, launching a revolution in communication and entertainment. Baird’s invention, a pictorial-transmission machine he called a “televisor,” used ...read more
On October 9, 1992, 18-year-old Michelle Knapp is watching television in her parents’ living room in Peekskill, New York when she hears a thunderous crash in the driveway. Alarmed, Knapp ran outside to investigate. What she found was startling, to say the least: a sizeable hole ...read more
Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in 1901 broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal. His company’s Marconi radios ended the isolation of ocean travel and ...read more
