Margaret Knight: Inventor of the flat-bottomed paper bag machine (1838-1914) Margaret Knight was fascinated by machinery; she eventually settled on inventing as a full-time profession. Inventing was an unusual choice of career for a woman in the 19th century, and Knight’s gender would complicate her efforts to receive credit for her most important invention, a … Read more
The History of the Computer Computer are unlike some other inventions in that no single person invented them and the idea was not born at a definite moment in time. In fact, computer have been developing since the mid-seventeenth century and continue to evolve more than three centuries later. In their original form, computers were … Read more
Martin Cooper: Developer of The Cell Phone The telephone and radio were two of the greatest inventions of the late 19th century. During the 20th century, they came together in a third great invention: the cellular (mobile) telephone. Cellular phone use has grown rapidly since the device was developed in the 1970s; roughly one billion … Read more
Hans Lippershey: Inventor of The Telescope (1570-1619) Hans Lippershey is often credited with inventing the telescope because he was the first to file paperwork on the device. It remains unknown, however, whether Lippershey was a creative inventor with an original idea or only a craftsman with an appetite for entrepreneurship. Very little is known of … Read more
Stephanie Kwolek: Inventor of Kevlar Sometimes when a scientist makes a discovery, its nature and usefulness are not immediately clear. This is the case with chemist Stephanie Kwolek, who manufactured a bizarre liquid one day while working in a laboratory. Rather than throw it out, she insisted on having it analyzed. The testing revealed that … Read more
Guglielmo Marconi: Inventor of Radio (1874-1937) Most people think of radio as something they listen to at home or in the car, but the underlying technology has many more applications than simply sending and receiving music and speech. Radiotelegraphy-or radio, for short-is also known as “wireless” technology because it is a way of using electricity … Read more
James Russell developed the concepts underlying the compact disc (CD) and the digital video disc (DVD), both widely popular technologies that use light to store data. Russell’s ideas were somewhat ahead of their time, and Russell has never profited materially from his inventions. Nonetheless, his work radically altered the computer, music, television, and film industries … Read more
Albert Calmette was born in Nice, France, on July 12, 1863. He had two brothers, one of whom became an army physician, and the other, a journalist. When he was only two years old, his mother, Adele Reine Charpentiere, died, and his father, Guillaume Calmette, remarried; Calmette was reared by his stepmother, Marie Quiney. When … Read more