The son of an enslaved woman who arrived in America with little English and mechanised the making of shoes
Working in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, he spent years building a machine to do the one job that skilled hand workers said no machine…
Programmed the first electronic computer and was written out of the story for 40 years
A farm girl from Missouri, she was one of six women who worked out how to program ENIAC with cables and switches and no manual. When it was unveiled…
The engineer from Queens who invented the video game cartridge
A self-taught electronics enthusiast who never finished college, he led the team that built the first games console with swappable cartridges, a…
Built the first working television out of a hatbox, a biscuit tin and darning needles
In poor health and short of money after a string of failed businesses, he assembled a television from junk in a Hastings lodging house and in 1926…
Blind from the age of six, he built 180 miles of roads across the Pennines and laid them over bogs
Blind Jack of Knaresborough lost his sight to smallpox, earned his living as a fiddler, ran a stagecoach line, and from 1765 became the first…
Built the sewers that rid London of cholera and are still working 160 years later
After a breakdown from overwork and years of political delay, he designed and built London's sewer system: 82 miles of main sewers, three embankments…
Built computers by hand in a tiny London lab and wrote the first assembly language
In a two-person group at Birkbeck College with almost no money, she helped design and build three early computers, wrote the first assembly language…
Built the first working programmable computer in his parents' living room
Bored by the endless calculations of his engineering job, he built a computer from scrap metal and old telephone relays. It worked in 1941, and was…
A Hungarian journalist who fled the Nazis to Argentina and gave the world the ballpoint pen
Frustrated by fountain pens that smudged, he noticed how fast newspaper ink dried and, with his chemist brother, designed a pen fed by a rolling…
Son of escaped slaves who drew the telephone patent and made the light bulb last
Starting as an office boy in a patent firm, he taught himself drafting by watching, drew the plans for Bell's telephone patent and patented a better…
Widowed with eleven children, she became the first woman professor of engineering in America
A psychologist and industrial engineer who studied how people actually work, she designed the kitchen layout most homes still use and kept her…
Started an operating system as a hobby and it now runs most of the world's servers and phones
A 21-year-old student in Helsinki posted a message saying his new system was "just a hobby, won't be big". Linux now underpins Android,…
The NASA engineer who invented the Super Soaker by accident and spends the royalties on battery research
Raised in segregated Alabama, he was the only Black student at a 1968 science fair and won it with a robot built from scrap. He worked on the Galileo…
Blinded at three in his father's workshop, he invented at fifteen the alphabet blind people still read with
A harness maker's son who lost his sight to an accident and an infection, he took a clumsy military code of raised dots and reduced it to a six-dot…
Fired by IBM for transitioning, she started again from nothing and rewrote how computer chips are designed
A brilliant young IBM researcher, she was sacked in 1968 when she told the company she was transitioning. Rebuilding her career in secret, she went…
The engineer who tamed floods, built a great dam and is honoured every year on India's Engineers' Day
From a poor village family near Bangalore, he became the outstanding civil engineer of British India, patented automatic flood gates, drained a…
Brought the first computer to Latin America and built Argentina's computer science from nothing
A mathematician exiled twice by Argentina's political upheavals, he imported the country's first digital computer, founded its earliest computer…
Wrote the software that landed Apollo 11 and kept its head when the alarms went off
Leading the Apollo flight software team while raising a young daughter, she insisted on error handling that NASA thought unnecessary. Minutes before…
Holds over 200 patents built on the technology that let phone calls travel over the internet
One of very few Black women in engineering at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1980s, she became a driving force behind voice-over-internet-protocol technology…
Petitioned a segregated school to attend night classes and became NASA's first Black woman engineer
Hired as a human computer in a segregated section, she had to ask the city for permission to attend classes at a white school to qualify as an…
An Egyptian engineer overlooked at Bell Labs who invented the transistor now inside almost everything
Leading a team of new recruits that senior physicists ignored, he worked out how to seal a silicon surface and then, with Dawon Kahng, built the…
Invented the alternating current motor that powers the world and died alone in a hotel room
He arrived in New York almost penniless, dug ditches after falling out with Edison, and designed the AC motors and transformers that made electricity…
A Harlem doctor who noticed Black patients went blind twice as often, and invented a laser to remove cataracts
The daughter of a subway motorman and a domestic worker, she became the first Black woman to complete an ophthalmology residency in America and in…
A Halifax road mender who left school at 13 and invented the cat's eye that guides drivers through the dark
A labourer's son who repaired roads for a living, he patented the reflective road stud in 1934 after a near miss on a foggy hill. The wartime…
