Sold newspapers as a boy, failed to become a pilot, and led India into space before becoming its president
The son of a boat owner on the island of Rameswaram, he missed selection as an air force pilot by one place. He directed the rocket that put India's…
Wrote the first published computer program a century before there was a computer to run it
Byron's daughter, bedridden for a year as a teenager, she taught herself mathematics and saw more clearly than Charles Babbage what his unbuilt…
Helped build the programming language and interface ideas Steve Jobs later saw and borrowed
A researcher at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, she helped design Smalltalk and the graphical desktop it ran on, then watched much of it become the basis of…
Invented stereo sound, helped create television and radar, and died testing his own equipment at 38
A boy who could barely read at 12, he filed 128 patents in 18 years, including the one that created stereo, and was killed in a wartime crash while…
A student from Barbados who wrote the first internet search engine to save himself some typing
Working as a systems administrator at McGill University in 1989, he wrote a script to index the files scattered across the early internet. Archie was…
Father of computer science whose codebreaking helped shorten the Second World War
He imagined the modern computer before one existed, led the team that broke the German Enigma cipher, and was later persecuted by the country he had…
Flew an airship round the Eiffel Tower, gave the prize money away, and refused to patent his aeroplanes
A Brazilian coffee heir who made Paris gasp with his small airships, he made the first officially observed powered flight in Europe in 1906 and…
Built a portable heart monitor because rural Cameroon had almost no cardiologists
A young engineer troubled that a colleague's father died of a heart condition that could have been caught early, he designed a tablet-based device…
Built robots to help disabled children move and NASA rovers to help scientists see Mars
Inspired as a child by a robot on television, she became a NASA engineer working on Mars rover vision systems before shifting her research to robots…
The motorcycle racer whose small brass fitting stopped Spitfires stalling in combat
A butcher's daughter who lapped Brooklands at over 100 mph on her Norton, she solved the Merlin engine's cut-out problem in the Battle of Britain and…
Took her husband's unproven car on a 65-mile road trip without telling him and fixed it as she went
Her dowry funded Karl Benz's workshop, and in 1888 she made the first long-distance drive in history, clearing a fuel line with a hatpin and…
One of the first women to design video games, she wrote River Raid and retired at 35 on the proceeds
An engineering graduate hired by Atari in 1978 when almost no women wrote games, she was told she could do colour matching for cosmetics. At…
Designed the first general-purpose computer in the 1830s and never got to see it built
He spent decades and a fortune designing calculating engines that were never finished, fell out with his engineer and his government, and was proved…
Told that glass could never carry a telephone call, he proved it could and wired the world with light
An engineer at a Harlow telephone laboratory, he argued in 1966 that pure enough glass fibre could carry signals for miles, then spent years…
Gatecrashed the Royal Navy's review with an uninvited boat to prove his turbine worked
He invented the steam turbine, lost the rights to it and had to invent a second version. In 1897 he raced his little Turbinia through the fleet at…
Supported his invalid parents from age 12 and was turned down by twenty firms before the photocopier worked
A patent clerk with arthritis who made the first dry photocopy in a rented kitchen in Queens in 1938, he waited more than twenty years for a machine…
Created the C language and co-wrote Unix, the quiet foundations of almost every computer today
Working on a cast-off machine after a big project collapsed, he and Ken Thompson wrote an operating system for themselves. His language C and their…
Arrived from Colombia speaking almost no English and went on to direct a Mars rover landing
Moved to the United States from Colombia at seventeen with little money and little English, she cleaned houses to pay for classes, eventually became…
Ran a segregated team of Black mathematicians, then taught them all to program before the machines arrived
A schoolteacher who joined the wartime aeronautics laboratory at Langley in 1943, she became its first Black supervisor and, when electronic…
Demonstrated the mouse, hypertext and video calls in 1968, then lost his funding and was forgotten
A Depression-era farm boy who decided to devote his life to making computers help people think. His 1968 demonstration showed nearly everything we…
Given six months to rebuild a cyclone-wrecked bridge, he did it in 46 days, then built India's metros on time
A railway engineer from Kerala known for finishing things early and under budget, he drove the Konkan Railway through 760 kilometres of mountains and…
Orphaned at 12, she became the first woman electrical engineer in America after a detour to Turkey
The first woman to take an electrical engineering degree at MIT, she could only get work supervising women calculators. She invented a calculator for…
Trained as an engineer in Scotland, hired as an oiler, and invented the device that kept trains running
The son of parents who escaped slavery by the Underground Railroad, he could only get work shovelling coal despite his qualifications. He turned that…
Told she would never walk again, she ran the factory that built Canada's Hurricane fighters
The first woman in Canada to graduate in electrical engineering and the first in the world to design an aircraft, she caught polio at 24 and walked…
