Famous scientists who invented things

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Sign Up. Read More Previous. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. The list of his contributions to the world of engineering is virtually endless. Edison was the archetypal inventor and epitomises the American spirit of inquiry and entrepreneurship.

A shrewd businessman with unbridled imagination, he is credited with thousands of inventions, including the phonograph, the electric light bulb, the telephone although Alexander Graham Bell made it to the patent office first on that occasion , the movie camera, the microphone and alkaline batteries. Did you know that Thomson, one of the companies that later became the Thales Group, was set up to exploit some of Edison's patents?

Archimedes was undoubtedly one of the big names of engineering in the 3 rd century BC. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists of classical antiquity. We owe it to Archimedes for inventing the pulley, the lever, the catapult and the cog… not to mention the Archimedes screw. And where would fluid mechanics be today without that original Eureka moment? As a founding father, Benjamin Franklin was one of the people who invented America!

His legacy includes the lightning conductor, bifocal lenses, and, according to some, the first experiments in nanoscience. These two tie for 6 th place in our list because they both made discoveries that are still saving millions of lives today.

Frenchman Louis Pasteur was the first microbiologist. He invented the principles of vaccination and pasteurisation, which turned out to be hugely important for human health. Across the English Channel, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin a few decades later, so he's the one that made antibiotics possible.

They go together because they were both pioneers of modern medicine and the first scientists to declare all-out war on viruses and bacteria! It was a chance invitation in to join a journey around the world that would make Darwin, who had once studied to become a country parson, the father of evolutionary biology. Aboard the HMS Beagle , between bouts of seasickness, Darwin spent his five-year trip studying and documenting geological formations and myriad habitats throughout much of the Southern Hemisphere, as well as the flora and fauna they contained.

He noticed small differences between members of the same species that seemed to depend upon where they lived. The finches of the Galapagos are the best-known example: From island to island, finches of the same species possessed differently shaped beaks, each adapted to the unique sources of food available on each island.

This suggested not only that species could change — already a divisive concept back then — but also that the changes were driven purely by environmental factors, instead of divine intervention. Today, we call this natural selection. When Darwin returned, he was hesitant to publish his nascent ideas and open them up to criticism, as he felt that his theory of evolution was still insubstantial.

Instead, he threw himself into studying the samples from his voyage and writing an account of his travels. Through his industrious efforts, Darwin built a reputation as a capable scientist, publishing works on geology as well as studies of coral reefs and barnacles still considered definitive today.

Darwin also married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, during this time. This was a level of attention uncommon among fathers at that time — to say nothing of eminent scientists. That wasn't all that made Darwin unique. He had an appreciation for taxidermy and unusual food, and suffered from ill health. Through it all, the theory of evolution was never far from his mind, and the various areas of research he pursued only strengthened his convictions.

Darwin slowly amassed overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution in the 20 years after his voyage. All of his observations and musings eventually coalesced into the tour de force that was On the Origin of Species , published in when Darwin was 50 years old. The page book sold out immediately, and Darwin would go on to produce six editions, each time adding to and refining his arguments. It was based on two ideas: that species can change gradually over time, and that all species face difficulties brought on by their surroundings.

From these basic observations, it stands to reason that those species best adapted to their environments will survive and those that fall short will die out. Nikola Tesla grips his hat in his hand. He points his cane toward Niagara Falls and beckons bystanders to turn their gaze to the future.

This bronze Tesla — a statue on the Canadian side — stands atop an induction motor, the type of engine that drove the first hydroelectric power plant. His designs advanced alternating current at the start of the electric age and allowed utilities to send current over vast distances, powering American homes across the country. He developed the Tesla coil — a high-voltage transformer — and techniques to transmit power wirelessly.

Cellphone makers and others are just now utilizing the potential of this idea. Tesla is perhaps best known for his eccentric genius. He once proposed a system of towers that he believed could pull energy from the environment and transmit signals and electricity around the world, wirelessly. But his theories were unsound, and the project was never completed.

San Diego Comic-Con attendees dress in Tesla costumes. The American Physical Society even has a Tesla comic book where, as in real life, he faces off against the dastardly Thomas Edison. While his work was truly genius, much of his wizardly reputation was of his own making. It was around for decades.

But his ceaseless theories, inventions and patents made Tesla a household name, rare for scientists a century ago. And even today, his legacy still turns the lights on. Around Dec. But his conclusions changed history. And his law of inertia allowed for Earth itself to rotate. The church declared the sun-centered model heretical, and an inquisition in ordered Galileo to stop promoting these views.

They placed him under house arrest until his death in , the same year Isaac Newton was born. To say she was ahead of her time would be an understatement. Their collaboration started in the early s, when Lovelace was just 17 and still known by her maiden name of Byron.

She was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron. Babbage had drawn up plans for an elaborate machine he called the Difference Engine — essentially, a giant mechanical calculator. In the middle of his work on it, the teenage Lovelace met Babbage at a party.

There, he showed off an incomplete prototype of his machine. Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention. It was mathematical obsession at first sight. The Analytical Engine was more than a calculator — its intricate mechanisms and the fact that the user fed it commands via a punch card meant the engine could perform nearly any mathematical task ordered. Lovelace even wrote instructions for solving a complex math problem, should the machine ever see the light of day.

Many historians would later deem those instructions the first computer program, and Lovelace the first programmer. Memories of middle or high school geometry invariably include an instructor drawing right triangles on a blackboard to explain the Pythagorean theorem. The lesson was that the square of the hypotenuse, or longest side, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides.

A proof followed, adding a level of certainty rare in other high school classes, like social studies and English. Pythagoras, a sixth-century B. Greek philosopher and mathematician, is credited with inventing his namesake theorem and various proofs. But forget about the certainty. Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians used the equation centuries before Pythagoras, says Karen Eva Carr, a retired historian at Portland State University, though many scholars leave open the possibility he developed the first proof.

Even so, we know enough to suspect Pythagoras was one of the great mathematicians of antiquity. His influence was widespread and lasting. Read More: Hey, I know that name. Meet the scientists behind the measurement units you use in your daily life. It started in Sweden: a functional, user-friendly innovation that took over the world, bringing order to chaos.

No, not an Ikea closet organizer. He lived at a time when formal scientific training was scant and there was no system for referring to living things. The 18th century was also a time when European explorers were fanning out across the globe, finding ever more plants and animals new to science.

He intended the simple Latin two-word construction for each plant as a kind of shorthand, an easy way to remember what it was. The names moved quickly from the margins of a single book to the center of botany, and then all of biology.

Linnaeus started a revolution, but it was an unintentional one. Today we regard Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, which is used to sort the entire living world into evolutionary hierarchies, or family trees.

But the systematic Swede was mostly interested in naming things rather than ordering them, an emphasis that arrived the next century with Charles Darwin.