Famous inventors and their inventions

How these ten were chosen

Most inventions have many parents, so “who invented it” is often the wrong question. This list picks ten people whose own records show what they built, tested or patented: notebooks, patents, published papers, or treatises. For each one you get the invention and year, one thing most lists get wrong or leave out, and the source to read. They are in date order, from ancient Sicily to North Carolina in 1903.

The list has gaps that matter. Paper (China, by the 2nd century CE), the decimal place-value numerals (India) and many other inventions that changed the world have no single named inventor whose records survive, so they are not here.

Archimedes (about 287 to 212 BCE): the screw pump, pulleys and war machines

Archimedes of Syracuse worked out the law of the lever and the principle of buoyancy, and ancient writers credit him with compound pulleys, a water-lifting screw and machines that held off the Roman siege of Syracuse until 212 BCE. Similar screws may have existed before him in Egypt; the name stuck to him.

Most lists miss: his own account of how he discovered results, The Method, survived in only one copy, a 10th-century manuscript that was scraped and written over as a prayer book in the 13th century. It was recognised in 1906, and the Archimedes Palimpsest has since been read with modern imaging. The bath and “Eureka” story comes from Vitruvius, two centuries later; see did Archimedes shout Eureka.

Johannes Gutenberg (about 1400 to 1468): printing with movable metal type

Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Mainz, combined a hand mould for casting metal letters, an oil-based ink and a screw press. His 42-line Latin Bible of the mid-1450s is the first major book printed this way in Europe.

Most lists miss: he did not invent printing or even movable type. Bi Sheng made movable clay type in China around 1040, and the Korean book Jikji was printed with metal type in 1377. And Gutenberg lost his own workshop: in a 1455 lawsuit his backer Johann Fust won back his loan, and the press passed largely to Fust. Source: the Helmasperger notarial instrument of 1455.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519): designs, mostly never built

Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of notebook pages, in mirror writing, with designs for flying machines, diving gear, bridges, pumps and weapons. Very few were built in his lifetime, and some would not have worked. His value as an inventor is in the method: drawing, observing and testing ideas on paper.

Most lists miss: when he asked the Duke of Milan for a job around 1482, his draft letter listed bridges, siege engines, cannon and armoured vehicles first, and mentioned painting only near the end. Source: Codex Atlanticus. Compare him with his rival in Leonardo vs Michelangelo.

Galileo Galilei (1564 to 1642): an improved telescope and a calculating compass

Galileo did not invent the telescope. Dutch spectacle makers had one by 1608. Within a year he had ground his own lenses and raised the magnification to about twenty times, enough to see Jupiter’s moons and mountains on the Moon, which he published in Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) in March 1610.

Most lists miss: before the telescope he made money from an invention of his own, a “geometric and military compass”, a hinged calculating instrument for gunners and surveyors. He sold it from his workshop in Padua and published a manual for it in 1606.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 to 1790): the lightning rod, bifocals and a stove

Benjamin Franklin proposed the pointed lightning rod around 1750 after his electrical experiments, published instructions for fitting one in Poor Richard’s Almanack, and also designed an iron fireplace (the Pennsylvania fireplace, 1740s) and bifocal spectacles, which he described in a letter of 1785.

Most lists miss: he refused to patent the stove. In his Autobiography he explains that since we benefit from the inventions of others, we should be glad to serve others with ours. The famous kite story is less certain than schoolbooks suggest; see did Franklin fly a kite in a storm.

Louis Pasteur (1822 to 1895): pasteurisation and vaccines

Louis Pasteur showed that fermentation and decay are caused by microorganisms, developed gentle heating to kill them, and made vaccines against anthrax (1881) and rabies (1885).

Most lists miss: pasteurisation was first used on wine and beer in the 1860s, not milk. Pasteurising milk became common only later, after his death. Source: his Études sur le vin (1866).

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 to 1922): the telephone

Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of the deaf, received US patent 174,465 for the telephone on 7 March 1876. Three days later his notebook records the first call: he spoke to his assistant Thomas Watson, who heard and understood him. Elisha Gray filed a notice of a similar idea at the patent office on the same day as Bell’s application, and the dispute ran for years.

Most lists miss: Bell’s voice survives. A wax disc made at his Volta Laboratory on 15 April 1885 ends with the words “hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell”, and in 2013 the Smithsonian played it back with optical scanning. More: Edison vs Bell.

Thomas Edison (1847 to 1931): the phonograph and a practical light bulb

Thomas Edison held more than a thousand US patents and ran the first industrial research laboratories, at Menlo Park and West Orange in New Jersey. He invented the phonograph in 1877 and in 1879 made a long-lasting carbon-filament lamp, then built the power system to light homes: the Pearl Street station in New York opened in 1882.

Most lists miss: others, including Joseph Swan in England, made working bulbs before him; Edison’s contribution was a practical lamp plus the whole system. And in 1878 he listed the uses of the phonograph with dictation and letters first, music further down. In the 1880s he fought the alternating current system backed by Westinghouse and developed by Nikola Tesla; hear that argument in the War of Currents debate. More: did Edison invent the light bulb.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 to 1937): millimetre waves and the crescograph

Jagadish Chandra Bose generated and detected very short radio waves at Presidency College, Calcutta, in the mid-1890s, and demonstrated them at the Royal Institution in London in 1897. Later he built the crescograph, an instrument that magnified the growth of plants so it could be measured.

Most lists miss: he disliked patenting science, but friends persuaded him to file one US patent, for a crystal detector of electrical disturbances (US 755,840, granted 1904). It is one of the earliest patents for a semiconductor device. See Indian scientists in history.

Orville Wright (1871 to 1948): the first powered, controlled aeroplane

Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur, bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, flew their Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903. Orville piloted the first flight: 12 seconds and about 120 feet. Their key idea was control, with wing warping to steer, patented in 1906.

Most lists miss: their breakthrough came from a homemade wind tunnel. In 1901 they found published lift tables unreliable, tested some two hundred small wing shapes and used their own data. Later, angry at the Smithsonian for crediting a rival machine, Orville sent the 1903 Flyer to the Science Museum in London in 1928; it came home only in 1948.

Summary table: inventors, inventions and dates

Project ideas using famous inventors

• Patent hunt: find a real patent by Bell, Edison or Bose (the numbers are in the table) and explain in five sentences what it actually claims.
• Who really invented it: pick the telephone, the light bulb or printing and make a timeline of everyone involved. Rank them by evidence, not fame.
• Inventor’s pitch: write Leonardo’s job letter in your own words for a modern employer, keeping his order of skills.
• Interview by voice: write ten questions and practise them with the AI recreation of Thomas Edison or Orville Wright on Yuga, which you can talk to by voice or text. The recreations are built from their writings but are not the real people and can get facts wrong, so check answers against a source and cite the source.

For a full plan, see the historical figure interview project and how to research a historical figure.