When her husband was struck down, she quietly ran the building of the Brooklyn Bridge for 11 years
With the chief engineer bedridden and unable to visit the site, she taught herself mathematics and cable engineering and became his eyes, voice and…
Turned away by the stock exchange for being a woman, she built the first computerised word processor
A furrier's daughter from the Bronx who studied physics at night, she designed one of the first airline reservation systems and then, in 1969,…
Wrote banking software used across West Africa after being written off at school for cerebral palsy
Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a baby and misdiagnosed for years afterward, she taught herself to code, co-founded a Ghanaian software company, and…
The engineer from Dhaka who worked out how to make skyscrapers stand up cheaply
His tube structures made tall buildings lighter, stronger and far cheaper than before. The Sears Tower he engineered was the tallest building on…
Built a dataset of millions of labelled images that helped trigger the modern boom in AI
Arriving in New Jersey as a teenager barely speaking English, she worked in her family's dry-cleaning shop while finishing school, and later built…
A farm girl who joined IBM to pay off her student loan and stayed 45 years to become its first woman Fellow
She meant to be a maths teacher and took a job at IBM in 1957 only to clear her debts. She stayed for the rest of her working life and laid the…
Survived the Burma railway as a prisoner of war and put the first portable defibrillator in an ambulance
A Belfast cardiologist with a heart damaged by beriberi in a Japanese camp, he realised that people were dying of cardiac arrest before they reached…
Let his jet engine patent lapse because he could not afford the fee, then made it fly anyway
Rejected twice by the RAF for being too short, he designed the jet engine as a 22-year-old cadet, was ignored by the Air Ministry for a decade and…
An orphan who left school at 11 and invented the refrigerated lorry that changed what the world eats
Raised by a priest and self-taught as a mechanic, he built a small Minnesota town's first radio transmitter and its cinema sound, then in 1938…
Invented the gas mask and the traffic light, and walked into a poisoned tunnel to save lives
The son of formerly enslaved parents in Kentucky, he worked as a handyman, taught himself to fix sewing machines and patented a safety hood that he…
Could not read until he was 18 and went on to build the first passenger railways
The son of a colliery fireman, he had no schooling at all until he paid for night classes as a young man. He built the Stockton and Darlington and…
A sharecropper's daughter whose model of the Earth's shape made satellite navigation possible
She worked her way off the farm through a scholarship, spent 42 years computing satellite orbits at a naval base, and produced the precise model of…
A farm boy with no degree who invented the CT scanner and tested it on a pig's head from the butcher
Not academic at school, he learned electronics in the RAF and joined the record company EMI, where a walk in the country gave him the idea of…
Wrote the first compiler and made computers speak something like English
A maths professor who joined the Navy at 34, she invented the idea that programs could be written in words rather than numbers, and kept serving…
Watched his deaf father struggle and spent decades building the bionic ear others called impossible
An ear surgeon who was told that stimulating the hearing nerve with electrodes could never produce speech, he funded his research through telethons…
Turned down by his own government, he took his radio to Britain and sent a signal across the Atlantic
A poorly educated young man experimenting in his father's attic, he built the first practical wireless telegraph and, in 1901, claimed to have picked…
A Mexican teenager who built a television camera from scrap and patented colour TV at 23
Working at a Mexico City radio station while still a student, he built his own television equipment from junk and in 1940 patented a colour system…
The maintenance man whose homemade toy caught the boss's eye, and who went on to design the Game Boy
Hired to keep the card-making machines running at Nintendo, he was spotted playing with an extending toy arm he had built. He created the Game &…
Hollywood star who patented a torpedo guidance system that lies behind Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
Trapped in a marriage to an arms dealer, she fled Austria in 1937 and became a film star. In her spare time she invented frequency hopping, dismissed…
A watchmaker's daughter who mastered the electric arc and was refused by the Royal Society for being married
Raised by a widowed seamstress, she became the first woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, explained why arc lamps hissed and…
Lost both legs in a blizzard at 17 and built himself better ones, then built them for everyone else
A climbing prodigy whose legs were amputated after three nights lost on Mount Washington, he designed prostheses that let him climb harder than…
Nearly drowned in his first tunnel and went on to build railways, bridges and the biggest ships afloat
Almost killed when the Thames Tunnel flooded, he recovered to build the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge and three steamships…
The 12th-century court engineer who wrote down exactly how to build his machines so that others could
Chief engineer to the Artuqid rulers of Diyarbakir for a quarter of a century, he built water clocks, pumps and automata, and in 1206 finished a book…
Spent a decade making one idea work and set the industrial revolution in motion
A sickly, self-taught instrument maker who was refused a shop by the Glasgow guilds, he saw how to make the steam engine efficient and then spent…
