Items17The creator’s order
  1. 1Carl ZeissCarl ZeissBorn 11 Sept 1816Zeiss opened a precision workshop in Jena in 1846 and found that good microscopes were made by trial and error, with many lenses thrown away. In 1866 he hired the physicist Ernst Abbe to work out lens design mathematically, and later the glass chemist Otto Schott to make the special glass the…0i
  2. 2Werner von SiemensWerner von SiemensBorn 13 Dec 1816An artillery officer who taught himself telegraphy, Siemens founded a workshop in Berlin in 1847 with the mechanic Johann Georg Halske to build a pointer telegraph he had improved. His electrical knowledge won the contracts that mattered: the Prussian state lines, then the Indo-European telegraph…0i
  3. 3Charles Martin HallCharles Martin HallAluminium was once priced like silver because nobody could separate it cheaply. Hall, a young chemistry graduate from Oberlin College, worked out in 1886, in a woodshed with his sister Julia's help, how to do it by passing current through alumina dissolved in molten cryolite; Paul Héroult in France…0i
  4. 4Herbert Henry DowHerbert Henry DowDow was a chemist who knew that the brine under Midland, Michigan was rich in bromine, which photographers and drug makers needed, and he developed an electrolytic way to extract it. Early backers lost patience and his first companies failed, but Dow Chemical, founded in 1897, made the process pay.…0i
  5. 5Robert BoschRobert BoschBosch opened a workshop for precision mechanics and electrical engineering in Stuttgart in 1886 and found his market in a stubborn problem: reliable ignition for engines. The low-voltage magneto, and then the high-voltage magneto with spark plug developed by his engineer Gottlob Honold in 1902,…0i
  6. 6Leo BaekelandLeo BaekelandBorn 14 Nov 1863A Belgian chemist who did it twice. First came Velox, a photographic paper that amateurs could print on under artificial light, which George Eastman bought in 1899 for a sum that made Baekeland independent. He used the freedom to research resins and in 1907 produced Bakelite, the first fully…0i
  7. 7Madam C. J. WalkerMadam C. J. WalkerBorn 23 Dec 1867Walker's expertise was hair care for Black women, a market white-owned companies ignored. Having suffered hair loss herself and worked as an agent for Annie Turnbo Malone, she developed her own scalp treatment and the Walker system of washing, ointment and heated combs. The knowledge was spread…0i
  8. 8Arnold BeckmanArnold BeckmanBorn 10 Apr 1900A Caltech chemistry professor, Beckman was asked in 1934 by a citrus processor why its acidity measurements kept failing. He built a sturdy, portable acidity meter with a vacuum-tube amplifier, the pH meter, and realised every laboratory would want one. Beckman Instruments followed, and later the…0i
  9. 9Bill HewlettBill HewlettBorn 20 May 1913Hewlett's master's work at Stanford produced a cheap, stable audio oscillator using a light bulb to control its output, and with his classmate David Packard he started making it in a Palo Alto garage in 1939. Walt Disney's studio bought eight for Fantasia. Hewlett was the engineering mind and…0i
  10. 10An WangAn WangBorn 7 Feb 1920Wang was a Harvard physicist who patented a key technique for magnetic core memory, founded Wang Laboratories in 1951 on a few hundred dollars of savings and later sold the patent to IBM, which funded the growth. His understanding of digital electronics produced desktop calculators and then the…0i