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The Telephone
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Invented by: Alexander Graham Bell
Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh and educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the United States in 1871. In the U.S. he began teaching deaf-mutes, publicizing the system called visible speech. The system, which was developed by his father, the Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), shows how the lips, tongue, and throat are used in the articulation of sound. |
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In 1872 Bell founded a school for deaf-mutes in Boston. The school subsequently became part of Boston University, where Bell was appointed professor of vocal physiology. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882.
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The Automobile
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Invented by: Henry Ford
Ford was born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan, on July 30, 1863, and educated in district schools. He became a machinist's apprentice in Detroit at the age of 16. From 1888 to 1899 he was a mechanical engineer, and later chief engineer, with the Edison Illuminating Company. In 1893, after experimenting for several years in his leisure hours, he completed the construction of his first automobile, and in 1903 he founded the Ford Motor Company.
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The Lightbulb
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Invented by: Thomas Alva Edison
Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, on February 11, 1847. He attended school for only three months, in Port Huron, Michigan. When he was 12 years old he began selling newspapers on the Grand Trunk Railway, devoting his spare time mainly to experimentation with printing presses and with electrical and mechanical apparatus. In 1862 he published a weekly, known as the Grand Trunk Herald, printing it in a freight car that also served as his laboratory.
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For saving the life of a station official's child, he was rewarded by being taught telegraphy. While working as a telegraph operator, he made his first important invention, a telegraphic repeating instrument that enabled messages to be transmitted automatically over a second line without the presence of an operator.
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The Radio
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Invented by: Guglielmo Marconi
Marconi, Guglielmo, Marchese (1874-1937), Italian electrical engineer and Nobel laureate, known as the inventor of the first practical radio-signaling system. He was born in Bologna and educated at the University of Bologna. As early as 1890 he became interested in wireless telegraphy, and by 1895 he had developed apparatus with which he succeeded in sending signals to a point a few kilometers away by means of a directional antenna.
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After patenting his system in Great Britain, he formed (1897) Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd., in London. In 1899 he established communication across the English Channel between England and France, and in 1901 he communicated signals across the Atlantic Ocean between Poldhu, in Cornwall, England, and Saint John's, in Newfoundland, Canada. His system was soon adopted by the British and Italian navies, and by 1907 had been so much improved that transatlantic wireless telegraph service was established for public use. Marconi was awarded honors by many countries and received, jointly with the German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850-1918), the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in wireless telegraphy. During World War I he was in charge of the Italian wireless service and developed shortwave transmission as a means of secret communication. In the remaining years of his life he experimented with shortwaves and microwaves.
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The Airplane
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Invented by: Wilbur and Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) was born in Millville, Indiana, on April 16, 1867. As boys, he and his younger brother Orville made simple mechanical toys, and in 1888 they built a large printing press. The following year they began to publish the Dayton, Ohio, West Side News, edited by Wilbur. Already successful printers, the brothers opened a bicycle repair shop and showroom in 1892, and three years later they began assembling bicycles with tools of their own invention.
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