Ask people to name a famous inventor and you get the same handful of answers: Edison, Bell, the Wright brothers, maybe Tesla. Ask what each of them actually invented, and when, and the answers get vaguer. That is the gap this list fills. Below are 18 famous inventors, in the order their best-known invention arrived, with the year it happened, the thing it replaced, and the reason it still matters. Where the invention itself already has an entry on one of our century lists, the entry links to it.
A word on the word “inventor”. Several of the people here did not build the first version of anything. Marconi did not discover radio waves; Fleming did not turn penicillin into a medicine. What they share is that each one took an idea that existed only in a laboratory, a sketch or a patent office and turned it into something ordinary people could use. That is the test we applied, and it is why some household names are missing and a chemist from DuPont is not.
How this list was put together
Eighteen names, one invention each, ordered by the date the invention became real rather than by fame. Dates are the date of the working device, the patent or the first public demonstration, whichever is best documented, and each entry says which. Discoveries that stayed in the lab were left out, which is why Marie Curie, who discovered radium and polonium but did not invent a product from them, is not here. Wherever the invention has an entry on one of our century lists, the inventor’s entry links to it: our lists of inventions of the 19th century, the greatest inventions of the 20th century and the greatest inventions of the 21st century.
1. Johannes Gutenberg: the printing press (c. 1450)
Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400–1468) was a goldsmith from Mainz, and his invention is really three inventions working together: metal type cast from a hand mould so that every letter was identical and reusable, an oil-based ink that would stick to metal, and a wooden screw press adapted from the wine and paper presses of the Rhineland. Printing from carved blocks already existed in Europe and movable type had been tried in China and Korea centuries earlier; what Gutenberg added was a system that could produce a page quickly, cheaply and thousands of times over.
His workshop was printing by around 1450, and the 42-line Bible, the book that made the technique famous, was completed by about 1455. Within fifty years presses were operating in more than two hundred European cities. No portrait of Gutenberg was made in his lifetime; the engraving above, like every image of him, was produced long after his death.
2. Benjamin Franklin: the lightning rod (1752)
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) is on this list for the lightning rod, though he could have made it for the Franklin stove (1742) or bifocal spectacles, which he described in a letter in 1784. The lightning rod came out of his electrical experiments of the early 1750s, including the kite experiment of 1752, which established that lightning was electricity and could be drawn safely to the ground along a conductor. He published instructions for fitting a pointed iron rod to a building in the 1753 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Franklin refused to patent any of his inventions. His reasoning, set out in his autobiography, was that since we benefit from the inventions of others we should be glad to give our own freely. Church steeples and powder magazines were among the first buildings protected, and the basic design has not changed much in 270 years.
3. James Watt: the separate condenser steam engine (1769)
James Watt (1736–1819) did not invent the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine had been pumping water out of mines since 1712. What Watt invented, while repairing a model Newcomen engine at the University of Glasgow in 1765, was a way to stop it wasting most of its fuel: a separate condenser, so that the cylinder no longer had to be cooled and reheated on every stroke. He patented the idea in 1769.
The partnership with Matthew Boulton from 1775 turned the patent into a business, and Watt’s later rotative engines of the 1780s turned a pump into a machine that could drive mills and factories. Those engines are the direct ancestors of the locomotives on our 19th-century list. The unit of power is named after him.
4. Alessandro Volta: the electric battery (1800)
Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), a professor of physics at Pavia, announced the voltaic pile in a letter to the Royal Society in London dated 20 March 1800. It was a stack of zinc and copper discs separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in brine, and it did something no device had done before: it produced a steady, continuous electric current rather than the brief spark of a static machine or a Leyden jar.
Within weeks other scientists were using piles to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and within a decade Humphry Davy was isolating new elements with them. Every battery since, from the lead-acid cell to the lithium-ion pack in a phone, is a descendant. The pile is entry number one on our list of 19th-century inventions, and the volt is named after its inventor.
5. Samuel Morse: the electric telegraph (1844)
Samuel Morse (1791–1872) was a successful portrait painter who took up the telegraph in his forties. Electric telegraphs were being developed on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1830s, and Cooke and Wheatstone’s system was running on a British railway from 1839. Morse’s contribution, made with his partner Alfred Vail, was a single-wire system with a simple key and a code of dots and dashes that an operator could send and read by ear. He received his US patent in 1840.
The demonstration that settled the matter came on 24 May 1844, when Morse sent “What hath God wrought” from the Capitol in Washington to Baltimore over a line built with money voted by Congress. Telegraph wires followed the railways across America and Europe within a generation. The telegraph is covered in more detail on our 19th-century list.
6. Alfred Nobel: dynamite (1867)
Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) grew up around explosives; his father made mines for the Russian navy. The problem he set out to solve was nitroglycerine, discovered in 1847, which was far more powerful than gunpowder and so unstable that it killed people who transported it, including Nobel’s younger brother Emil in an 1864 explosion at the family works. Nobel’s answer was to soak the liquid into an absorbent clay called kieselguhr, producing a paste that could be shaped into sticks, handled safely and set off with a detonator he had already patented. He patented dynamite in 1867.
Tunnels, canals, railways and mines were dug faster and more cheaply than ever before, and Nobel became one of the richest men in Europe, holding more than 350 patents by the end of his life. His 1895 will left most of that fortune to fund the prizes that carry his name, first awarded in 1901. Dynamite has its own entry on our list of 19th-century inventions.
7. Alexander Graham Bell: the telephone (1876)
Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was a teacher of the deaf, from a family of speech teachers, and his interest in transmitting sound electrically grew out of that work. His US patent for the telephone was issued on 7 March 1876, and three days later, on 10 March, he spoke the first intelligible sentence over the instrument to his assistant in the next room: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
Bell was not the only person working on the problem. Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a similar device at the patent office on the same day Bell’s application was filed, and the priority dispute ran through the courts for years, with Bell’s patent upheld. The Bell Telephone Company was founded in 1877, and by the time of his death there were millions of telephones in service. The telephone’s entry on our 19th-century list picks up the story from there.
8. Thomas Edison: the phonograph and the practical light bulb (1877–1879)
Thomas Edison (1847–1931) holds 1,093 US patents, and his real invention may have been the industrial research laboratory he opened at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. Two things came out of it in quick succession. The phonograph, the first machine to record and play back sound, was demonstrated in December 1877 and patented in February 1878. The carbon-filament incandescent lamp followed in October 1879; its patent was issued in January 1880.
Edison was not the first to make an electric lamp glow, but he was the first to make one that lasted long enough and cost little enough to sell, and he built the generating stations, meters and wiring to go with it. The Pearl Street station in Manhattan began supplying customers in 1882. Both the phonograph and the light bulb have entries on our 19th-century list.
9. Karl Benz: the automobile (1886)
Karl Benz (1844–1929) of Mannheim applied for a patent on a “vehicle powered by a gas engine” on 29 January 1886, and German patent 37435 is generally taken as the birth certificate of the automobile. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen was a three-wheeler with a single-cylinder four-stroke engine of less than one horsepower, a tiller for steering and a top speed of about 16 km/h (10 mph). Unlike earlier steam carriages and one-off experiments, it was designed from the start as a complete vehicle around an internal-combustion engine.
The most famous journey in the car was not made by Benz. In August 1888 his wife Bertha, without telling him, drove the improved Model III about 106 km (66 miles) from Mannheim to Pforzheim with their two sons, buying fuel at a pharmacy and fixing the car on the road. The publicity did more for sales than anything Benz had managed. The automobile is on our 19th-century list.
10. Nikola Tesla: the alternating-current induction motor (1888)
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) arrived in New York from Europe in 1884 with a design for a motor that ran on alternating current and had no brushes or commutator to wear out. He was granted a group of patents for the induction motor and the polyphase AC system in May 1888, and George Westinghouse bought the rights the same year. The choice between Edison’s direct current and Westinghouse’s alternating current for powering cities, the so-called war of the currents, was decided in AC’s favour within a decade, because AC could be transmitted over long distances at high voltage and stepped down for use.
The Adams power station at Niagara Falls, built on Tesla’s polyphase patents, began sending power to Buffalo in 1896. Tesla went on to the Tesla coil (1891) and radio experiments, and died in a New York hotel room with little money and hundreds of patents. The electrical grid that his motor made practical is what the 20th-century inventions on our list all plug into.
11. Guglielmo Marconi: radio telegraphy (1896)
Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) was 20 when he began experimenting with Hertz’s newly discovered radio waves in the attic of his family’s villa near Bologna in 1894, and by the end of 1895 he was sending signals over more than a kilometre. The Italian government was not interested, so he went to London, where in June 1896 he filed the first patent for a system of telegraphy using radio waves. He was not a physicist; his gift was for building working equipment and finding customers for it, first shipping lines and navies, then the public.
On 12 December 1901 Marconi reported receiving the letter S in Morse code at St John’s, Newfoundland, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall, the first claimed transatlantic radio signal. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun. Radio’s entry on our 19th-century list covers the other pioneers, from Hertz to Tesla and Popov, who have a claim on the same invention.
12. Wilbur and Orville Wright: the airplane (1903)
Wilbur (1867–1912) and Orville Wright (1871–1948) ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, and approached flight as a control problem rather than a power problem. Gliders had flown; what nobody had solved was how to steer one. Their answer, wing warping to bank the aircraft, combined with a rudder and elevator, was worked out over three seasons of glider tests and a home-built wind tunnel. On 17 December 1903, on the sand at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville flew the powered Flyer for 12 seconds and 120 feet. Wilbur’s fourth flight that morning lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet.
The photograph above was taken at the moment of the first take-off by John T. Daniels, a member of the local lifesaving crew who had never used a camera before. The brothers’ patent on their control system was granted in 1906. The airplane is entry number one on our list of the greatest 20th-century inventions.
13. Philo Farnsworth: electronic television (1927)
Philo Farnsworth (1906–1971) is said to have sketched the idea for electronic television for his high-school chemistry teacher in Idaho at the age of 14: scan an image line by line with a beam of electrons, the way a plough works a field, instead of using the spinning mechanical discs that other television pioneers were relying on. On 7 September 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory, his image dissector camera tube transmitted its first picture, a single straight line. His patent on the system was issued in 1930.
The rest of his career was largely a fight with RCA, whose engineer Vladimir Zworykin had been working along similar lines. The patent office sided with Farnsworth on priority, and in 1939 RCA agreed to pay him royalties, the first time it had agreed to pay for patents rather than collect on them. Television’s entry on our 20th-century list covers the mechanical systems that came before him and the broadcasting that came after.
14. Alexander Fleming: penicillin (1928)
Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) is the one discoverer on this list, included because the thing he found became the most important manufactured drug of the century. Returning to his laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital, London, in September 1928, he noticed that a mould contaminating a culture plate of staphylococcus had killed the bacteria around it. He identified the mould as a Penicillium, named the substance it produced penicillin, and published the finding in 1929. He could not purify it in useful quantities, and the work stalled for a decade.
It was Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their team at Oxford who turned penicillin into a medicine in 1940–41, and American wartime industry that learned to make it by the ton. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The photograph shows Fleming at his bench in 1943, the year penicillin production was scaled up for the D-Day landings. Penicillin and antibiotics are on our 20th-century list.
15. Hedy Lamarr: frequency hopping (1942)
Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) was one of the biggest film stars of the 1940s, and she invented in her spare time. With the composer George Antheil she devised a way of guiding a torpedo by radio without the signal being jammed: transmitter and receiver would hop together between 88 frequencies in a pattern known only to them, an idea Antheil proposed synchronising with a mechanism like a player-piano roll. US patent 2,292,387, “Secret Communication System”, was granted to them on 11 August 1942.
The Navy filed the patent away and did not put frequency hopping into use until the early 1960s, by which time it had expired. Spread-spectrum techniques of the kind Lamarr and Antheil described are now part of how Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and mobile networks share the airwaves, which is why she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. The mobile phone on our 20th-century list and the smartphone on our 21st-century list both depend on it.
16. Grace Hopper: the compiler (1952)
Grace Hopper (1906–1992) was a mathematics professor at Vassar who joined the Navy in 1943 and was assigned to the Harvard Mark I, one of the first programmable computers. In 1952, working on the UNIVAC at Remington Rand, she wrote the A-0 system, a program that translated symbolic instructions into machine code, the ancestor of every compiler. Her argument, that programmers should write in something closer to English and let the machine do the translation, was resisted at first and then adopted everywhere.
Her FLOW-MATIC language of the late 1950s was the main influence on COBOL, the business language defined in 1959 that still runs a surprising amount of the world’s banking. She retired from the Navy in 1986 as a rear admiral, at 79 the oldest serving officer at the time. The photograph is her official Navy portrait from 1984. The personal computer on our 20th-century list would have been unusable without her idea.
17. Stephanie Kwolek: Kevlar (1965)
Stephanie Kwolek (1923–2014) was a chemist at DuPont, the company that had invented nylon in 1935, and in 1965 she was looking for a lightweight fibre strong enough to replace the steel in car tyres. One of her polymer solutions came out thin and cloudy instead of thick and clear, and a technician was reluctant to run it through the spinning equipment. When it was spun, the fibre that came out was stiffer and stronger than anything the lab had seen. DuPont brought it to market in 1971 as Kevlar.
Weight for weight, Kevlar is about five times as strong as steel, and it went into bulletproof vests, helmets, ropes, sails, brake pads, aircraft and eventually the tyres it was meant for. Kwolek was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1995. Nylon, the DuPont fibre that came before it, is on our 20th-century list.
18. Tim Berners-Lee: the World Wide Web (1989–1991)
Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955) was a software engineer at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, when he wrote a memo in March 1989 proposing a way for the lab’s scientists to share documents across its mix of incompatible computers. His boss’s comment on it was “vague but exciting”. Over the next two years he wrote the three things that make the web: HTML for writing pages, HTTP for fetching them and the URL for addressing them, plus the first browser and the first server. The first website was running at CERN by the end of 1990, and in August 1991 Berners-Lee announced the project publicly on Internet newsgroups.
In April 1993 CERN put the web’s underlying code into the public domain, which is why anyone could build on it, and in 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium to keep its standards open. He was knighted in 2004 and received the Turing Award in 2016. The web runs on top of the internet, whose beginnings as ARPANET are on our 20th-century list; nearly everything on our 21st-century list assumes it exists.
What the 18 have in common
Very few of them were first. Watt improved Newcomen, Edison improved a lamp that others had made glow, Marconi built on Hertz, Farnsworth raced Zworykin, and Fleming’s mould sat in a dish for twelve years before anyone made a medicine from it. What the famous inventors share is not the first idea but the finished thing: a device that worked reliably, could be manufactured, and reached people who had never heard of the science behind it. Several also share a less comfortable pattern. Lamarr’s patent expired unused, Farnsworth spent his best years in court, and Tesla died poor. Being right and being rewarded are different problems.
If you want the inventions rather than the inventors, the three century lists go deeper on each one: inventions of the 19th century, the greatest inventions of the 20th century and the greatest inventions of the 21st century.
Image credits
All portraits are public-domain works from Wikimedia Commons except the following, used under Creative Commons licences: Stephanie Kwolek, photograph by Harry Kalish, Science History Institute, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; Tim Berners-Lee (2012), photograph by cellanr, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Wright brothers’ first flight was photographed by John T. Daniels (Library of Congress); the Alexander Fleming photograph is from the Imperial War Museums collection; the Grace Hopper portrait is an official US Navy photograph by James S. Davis.