Categories:

• Earth and the Environment
  • Atmosphere and Weather
  • Biographies
  • Ecology and Environmentalism
  • Geography
  • Geology and Oceanography
  • Minerals, Mining, and Metallurgy
• History
  • Ancient Greece and Rome
  • Asia and Africa
  • Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific
  • Biographies
  • Historians and Chronicles
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Modern Europe
  • United States and Canada
• Literature and the Arts
  • Art and Architecture
  • Biographies
  • Classical Literature, Mythology, and Folklore
  • Fashion, Design, and Crafts
  • Journalism and Publishing
  • Language, Linguistics, and Literary Terms
  • Literature in English
  • Literature in Other Modern Languages
  • Performing Arts
  • Scholars and Historians
• Medicine
  • Anatomy and Physiology
  • Biographies
  • Diseases and Conditions
  • Divisions, Diagnostics, and Procedures
  • Drugs
  • Psychology
• People
  • History
  • Literature and the Arts
  • Medicine
  • Philosophy and Religion
  • Science and Technology
  • Social Sciences and the Law
  • Sports and Games
• Philosophy and Religion
  • Ancient Religions
  • Biographies
  • Christianity
  • Eastern Religions
  • Islam
  • Judaism
  • Other Religious Beliefs and General Terms
  • Philosophy
  • The Bible
• Places
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • Australia and Oceania
  • Britain, Ireland, France, and the Low Countries
  • Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic Nations
  • Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe
  • Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Oceans, Continents, and Polar Regions
  • Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and the Balkans
  • United States and Canada
• Plants and Animals
  • Agriculture and Horticulture
  • Animals
  • Biographies
  • Botany
  • Microbes, Algae, and Fungi
  • Plants
  • Zoology and Veterinary Medicine
• Science and Technology
  • Astronomy and Space Exploration
  • Biochemistry
  • Biographies
  • Biology and Genetics
  • Chemistry
  • Computers and Electrical Engineering
  • Mathematics
  • Physics
  • Technology
• Social Sciences and the Law
  • Anthropology and Archaeology
  • Biographies
  • Economics, Business, and Labor
  • Education
  • Law
  • Political Science and Government
  • Sociology and Social Reform
• Sports and Everyday Life
  • Biographies
  • Crafts and Household Items
  • Days and Holidays
  • Fashion and Clothing
  • Food and Drink
  • Games
  • Manners and Customs
  • Social Organizations
  • Sports

Documents for "Technology: Biographies":

• Arkwright, Sir Richard 1732-92, English inventor. His construction of a machine for spinning, the water frame, patented in 1769, was an early step in the Industrial Revolution. His machines and his gift for organization...

• Benz, Karl 1844-1929, German engineer, credited with building the first automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine. The car, driven in Mannheim in 1885 and patented in 1886, had three wheels, an...

• Birdseye, Clarence 1886-1956, American inventor and founder of the frozen food industry, b. Brooklyn, N. Y., studied at Amherst College. In 1912 he went to Labrador on a fur-trading expedition and when he returned to...

• Borden, Gail 1801-74, American dairyman, surveyor, and inventor, b. Norwich, N.Y. He was for several years a deputy surveyor in Mississippi; afterward he joined the colony of Stephen F. Austin in Texas. There, besides farming, stock-raising, and newspaper activities, he superintended the surveying of lands for Austin. He laid out the city of Galveston, where he became collector of...

• Bramah, Joseph 1748-1814, English inventor. In 1784 he took out his first patent on a safety lock, and in 1795 he patented his hydraulic press, known as the Bramah press (see under hydraulic machine ). He devised...

• Brunel, Sir Marc Isambard 1769-1849, British engineer and inventor. Born in France, he came to the United States in 1793 as a royalist refugee. He became chief engineer of New York City, and his projects included building...

• Carrier, Willis Haviland 1876-1950, American engineer who played a key role in inventing air conditioning, b. Angola, N.Y., grad. Cornell Univ. (M.E. 1901). Working for the Buffalo Forge Co. (1901-14), he developed (1902) a dehumidifier and discovered that circulating air over cold pipes not only...

• Cartwright, Edmund 1743-1823, English inventor and clergyman. He was the inventor of an imperfect power loom that, when finally patented (1785), became the parent of the modern loom. It was the first machine to make...

• Caus, Salomon de 1576-1626, French engineer and physicist, educated in England. From 1614 to 1620 he was engineer to the Elector Palatine, Frederick, at Heidelberg. Because of his Les Raisons des forces mouvantes avec...

• Caux, Salomon de see Caus, Salomon de.

• Colt, Samuel 1814-62, American inventor, b. Hartford, Conn. In 1835-36, he patented a revolving-breech pistol and founded at Paterson, N.J., the Patent Arms Company, which failed in 1842. An order for 1,000...

• Crompton, Samuel 1753-1827, English inventor of the mule spinner, or muslin wheel, an important step in the development of fine cotton spinning. Working as a young man in a spinning mill, he knew the defects of the...

• Ctesibius fl. 2d cent. BC, Alexandrian Greek inventor. He reputedly was the first to discover and apply the expansive power of air as a motive force. Among the inventions ascribed to him are a water clock...

• Daimler, Gottlieb 1834-1900, German engineer, inventor, and pioneer automobile manufacturer. His improvements in the internal-combustion engine, made in the 1880s, contributed largely to the development of the...

• Dollond, John 1706-61, English optician and inventor. A silk weaver, he taught himself languages, mathematics, and science, becoming a noted scholar as well as a scientist. He invented the achromatic lens,...

• Drebbel, Cornelis Jacobszoon 1572-1634, Dutch inventor, physicist, and mechanician. His major inventions were an atmospherically driven clock and the first navigable submarine ; the first voyage was in 1620. His other inventions include thermostats used to make self-regulating ovens, as well as various optical instruments. He also discovered a process for making scarlet...

• Edgerton, Harold 1903-90, American inventor and educator, b. Fremont, Nebr. He was educated at the Univ. of Nebraska and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (D.Sc., 1931), and taught at the latter as...

• Ericsson, John 1803-89, Swedish-American inventor and marine engineer, b. Värmlands co., Sweden. He moved to London in 1826, and entered the railroad locomotive Novelty in a contest in 1829, only to be defeated by George Stephenson 's Rocket. Ericsson's outstanding role in the development of the screw propeller (he patented one in 1836) for ships was responsible for his coming to America in 1839 to build for the U.S. navy. The U.S.S. Princeton, completed by him in 1844, was the first warship with a screw propeller. Unfortunately, one of the ship's guns, which he did not build, exploded and killed several dignitaries, and he was blamed...

• Ernst, Richard 1933-, Swiss chemist. He worked as a research scientist from 1963 until 1968 in Palo Alto, Calif., before becoming a professor in Zürich. He was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his...

• Evans, Oliver 1755-1819, American inventor, b. near Newport, Del. He joined his brothers in a flour-milling business in Wilmington, and after studying similar earlier devices, he developed, installed, and...

• Fitch, John 1743-98, American inventor, b. Windsor, Conn. Fitch began (1785) work on the invention of the steam engine and steamboat and secured soon afterward the exclusive right to build and operate...

• Forsyth, Alexander John 1769-1843, Scottish inventor. He invented in 1807 the first workable percussion cap for the ignition of gunpowder in firearms. Forsyth refused an offer from Napoleon of £20,000 for the secret...

• Froude, William frood , 1810-79, English engineer and naval architect, brother of J. Anthony Froude ; educated at Oxford. In 1837 he worked on the Bristol and Exeter railroad, constructing the line from the Whitehall tunnel to Exeter. He studied the motion of a ship among waves, demonstrating that...

• Fulton, Robert 1765-1815, American inventor, engineer, and painter, b. near Lancaster, Pa. He was a man remarkable for his many talents and his mechanical genius. An expert gunsmith at the time of the American...

• Gatling, Richard Jordan 1818-1903, American inventor, b. Winton, N.C. He invented agricultural implements, which he manufactured in St. Louis, and then studied medicine in Indiana and Ohio, but he is remembered as the...

• Goodyear, Charles 1800-1860, American inventor, b. New Haven, Conn., originator of vulcanized rubber. He failed in his earlier business ventures and was in jail for debt when he began his experiments with rubber,...

• Graham, George 1674?-1751, English instrument maker. A clockmaker by trade, Graham designed clocks and watches that earned him membership in the Royal Society and were still manufactured into the present century...

• Hadley, John 1682-1744, English instrument maker. An optician by trade, Hadley built reflecting telescopes, based on Newton's model, that had greater resolution than the cumbersome refractors then in use. In...

• Hargreaves, James 1720?-1778, English engineer. In 1762 he made an unsuccessful attempt to develop a machine for carding, a process preparatory to spinning , and in 1764 he invented the spinning jenny, which resulted...

• Howe, Elias 1819-67, American inventor, b. Spencer, Mass. He was apprenticed in 1838 to an instrument maker and watchmaker in Boston at whose suggestion he turned his attention to devising a sewing machine. He...

• Hyatt, John Wesley 1837-1920, American inventor, b. Starkey, N.Y. He is known especially for his development of celluloid ; with his brothers, he began its manufacture in 1872. He also invented the Hyatt filter, a means of chemically purifying water while it is in motion; a widely used type of roller bearing; a...

• Ives, Frederic Eugene 1856-1937, American inventor, b. Litchfield, Conn. A pioneer in the development of orthochromatic and trichromatic photography and of photoengraving, he followed an earlier suggestion by James...

• Jacquard, Joseph Marie 1752-1834, French inventor, whose loom is of the greatest importance in modern mechanical figure weaving. After several years of experimentation, he received a bronze medal for his model exhibited...

• Kay, John 1704-64, English inventor. He patented (1733) the fly shuttle, operated by pulling a cord that drove the shuttle to either side, freeing one hand of the weaver to press home the weft. Workers in...

• Maxim name of a family of inventors and munition makers. Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, 1840-1916, was born near Sangerville, Maine. After launching on a career of inventing, he moved to England and there invented (1884) the Maxim machine gun. Among his numerous other inventions were...

• McCormick, Cyrus Hall 1809-84, inventor of the reaper, b. Rockbridge co., Va. His father, Robert McCormick (1780-1846), had worked intermittently for over 20 years at his blacksmith shop on a reaping machine, but had...

• McKay, Donald 1810-80, American shipbuilder, b. Nova Scotia. He opened his own shipyard in Newburyport, Mass., in 1841, then moved to Boston in 1845. He grew celebrated as designer and builder of the largest...

• Morse, Samuel Finley Breese 1791-1872, American inventor and artist, b. Charlestown, Mass., grad. Yale, 1810. He studied painting in England under Washington Allston and achieved some success. He returned to the United States in 1815, took up portrait painting, and gained a considerable reputation in this field. Associated with the Hudson River school, he also executed a number of landscapes and, less successfully, various historical works. A founder (1825) of the National Academy of Design, he spent the years from 1829 to 1832 in further...

• Newcomen, Thomas 1663-1729, English inventor of an early atmospheric steam engine (c.1711). It was an improvement over an earlier engine patented (1698) by Thomas Savery, who shared the later patent with Newcomen...

• Otis, Elisha Graves 1811-61, American inventor, b. Halifax, Vt. From his invention (1852) of an automatic safety device to prevent the fall of hoisting machinery he developed the first passenger elevator (1857). The...

• Otto, Nikolaus August 1832-91, German engineer. He was coinventor (1867) of an internal-combustion engine, and he devised (1876) the four-stroke Otto cycle, which was widely adopted for automobile, airplane, and other...

• Parsons, Sir Charles Algernon 1854-1931, British engineer. He invented a revolutionary steam turbine that bears his name. His first turbines were constructed to drive generators to produce electricity. In 1897, Parsons...

• Pierce, John 1910-2002, American electrical engineer, b. Des Moines, Iowa, grad. California Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1936). Pierce worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he proposed (1954) a...

• Polhem, Christopher 1661-1751, Swedish inventor and industrialist. After studying engineering techniques used in Germany, the Netherlands, France, and England, Polhem set up a mechanical laboratory that gave...

• Ramelli, Agostino c.1531-c.1600, Italian engineer who served in the armies of the marquis de Marignan and of the duc d'Anjou (later Henry III of France). His book, Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (1558), urged the application of mathematics to mechanics and contained many illustrations and explanations of water-powered machines such as pumps, derricks, grinding mills, sawmills, bridges, and...

• Rankine, William John Macquorn 1820-72, Scottish engineer and physicist. Serving as a professor of engineering at the Univ. of Glasgow from 1855, he made valuable contributions to civil and mechanical engineering as well as to...

• Remington, Eliphalet 1793-1861, American inventor, gunsmith, and arms manufacturer, b. Suffield, Conn. Trained in blacksmithing, he turned to gunsmithing at an early age. With his father he founded a firearms firm at...

• Remington, Philo see under Remington, Eliphalet.

• Reynolds, Osborne 1842-1912, British mechanical engineer. He was educated at Cambridge and became (1868) the first professor of engineering at the Univ. of Manchester, where his courses attracted a number of...

• Roebuck, John 1718-94, English physician, chemist, and inventor. He acted as a chemical consultant to local industries in Birmingham and invented the lead chamber process of manufacturing sulfuric acid and a...

• Savery, Thomas c.1650-1715, English engineer. He became a military engineer, rising to the rank of captain by 1702. He spent his free time performing experiments in mechanics, inventing such devices as a machine...

• Singer, Isaac Merrit 1811-75, American inventor, b. Rensselaer co., N.Y. As a child he lived in Oswego, N.Y. He patented in 1851 a practical sewing machine that could do continuous stitching. Although he lost a suit...

• Stephenson, George 1781-1848, British engineer, noted as a locomotive builder. He learned to read and write in night school at the age of 18, while working in a colliery. He constructed (1814) a traveling engine, or...

• Stevens family of U.S. inventors. John Stevens, 1749-1838, b. New York City, was graduated from King's College (now Columbia Univ.) in 1768. He studied law (1768-71) and soon joined his father, a wealthy landowner and merchant, in New Jersey...

• Talbot, William Henry Fox 1800-1877, English inventor of photographic processes (see photography, still ). A man of enormously versatile intelligence, he invented the "photogenic drawing" process in 1834. From 1841 on he patented his numerous processes for making negatives and positive prints, called calotypes and later talbotypes. His patents threatened to impede the technical...

• Thomas, Seth 1785-1859, American clock manufacturer, b. Wolcott, Conn. In 1812 he sold his partnership in a clock business established by Eli Terry and set up a factory to make metal-movement clocks at Plymouth...

• Tompion, Thomas 1639?-1713, English clockmaker. When the Royal Observatory at Greenwich was established in 1676, Tompion was chosen to make two clocks, to be wound only once a year, which proved to be more...

• Trevithick, Richard 1771-1833, British engineer and inventor, b. Cornwall. He is known as the father of locomotive power because of his invention (1800) of the high-pressure steam engine. He built a steam carriage...

• Watt, James 1736-1819, Scottish inventor. While working at the Univ. of Glasgow as an instrument maker, Watt was asked to repair a model of Thomas Newcomen's steam engine. He devised improvements that resulted...

• Westinghouse, George 1846-1914, American inventor and manufacturer, b. Central Bridge, N.Y. In the Civil War he served in the Union army and navy. Among his inventions in the railroad field were a reversible frog, the...

• Whitney, Eli 1765-1825, American inventor of the cotton gin , b. Westboro, Mass., grad. Yale, 1792. When he was staying as tutor at Mulberry Grove, the plantation of Mrs. Nathanael Greene, Whitney was encouraged by Mrs. Greene and visiting cotton planters to...

• Wood, Jethro 1774-1834, American inventor, b. either in Dartmouth, Mass., or in Washington co., N.Y. In 1814, while a farmer in Cayuga co., N.Y., he patented a cast-iron plow in which he later embodied...