Inventors

Elihu Thomson was a prolific inventor and electrical pioneer whose innovations helped shape the modern world. Born in England in 1853, he immigrated to America as a child and became instrumental in th...

Only four feet tall with a stooped back, Charles Proteus Steinmetz loomed as a giant in the world of science and innovation. Fleeing persecution in Europe as a young man, this brilliant Prussian-Ameri...

Lee de Forest (1873–1961) was an American inventor whose ingenious creations helped spark the modern communications era. Often called the Father of Radio and hailed as a founding figure of the Electro...

Leo Szilard (1898–1964) was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor whose visionary ideas launched the atomic age. He helped achieve the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 194...

Glenn Theodore Seaborg was a trailblazing nuclear chemist who forever altered our understanding of the elements and ushered in the atomic era. Best known as the discoverer of ten transuranium elements...

Pioneer of the Nuclear Frontier In a modest laboratory at Berkeley in 1954, Emilio Segrè is already immersed in the atomic age. Born to well-to-do parents near Rome, he initially studied engineering b...

Master of Symmetry and Nuclear Power Eugene Wigner was a prodigious Hungarian-born physicist who became a towering figure in both quantum theory and nuclear technology. A child prodigy, he earned his ...

Sir George Paget Thomson was born into the very heart of British science – the son of Sir J. J. Thomson, the Cavendish Professor who discovered the electron. Following in his father’s footsteps, the y...

Carl Benz – Inventor of the First Modern Automobile Carl Benz was a visionary German engineer who built the world’s first practical automobile, forever changing how people travel. Rising from hu...

Lyman Spitzer Jr.: Pioneer of the Stars and Fusion Lyman Spitzer Jr. was born in 1914 in Ohio and from a young age combined classical scholarship with cosmic curiosity. He excelled at Yale University ...