Best Inventor

Johannes Gutenberg was a German printer whose movable-type press produced the Gutenberg Bible about 1455 and transformed European bookmaking.

The Wright brothers were American aviation pioneers whose Flyer made controlled powered flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath whose lightning experiments in the 1750s advanced electrical science and popularized the lightning rod.

Henry Ford was an American industrialist whose Model T, introduced in 1908, and moving assembly line made automobiles affordable to a mass market.

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born inventor whose 1876 U.S. telephone patent helped launch practical voice communication over wires.

Bob Kahn is an American engineer who, with Vint Cerf, designed TCP/IP, the core protocol suite adopted by ARPANET in 1983.

Sergei Korolev was a Soviet rocket engineer who led the program that launched Sputnik 1 in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.

Douglas Engelbart was an American computer engineer whose 1968 demo introduced the mouse, hypertext, windows, and collaborative editing.

Bartolomeo Cristofori was an Italian keyboard maker credited with inventing the piano around 1700, allowing players to vary loudness by touch.

Robert H. Goddard was an American physicist who launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in Massachusetts in 1926, a foundation of modern rocketry.

Ivan Sutherland is an American computer scientist whose 1963 Sketchpad system pioneered interactive graphics and computer aided design.

Henry Bessemer was an English engineer whose 1856 Bessemer process made large-scale, low-cost steel production possible by blowing air through molten iron.

Frank Whittle was a British engineer who patented a turbojet engine in 1930 and helped launch Britain’s first jet aircraft flight in 1941.

Alan Kay is an American computer scientist who shaped object oriented programming and led the Dynabook concept at Xerox PARC in 1972.

Les Paul was an American guitarist and inventor whose solid-body guitar work led to the 1952 Gibson Les Paul and advances in multitrack recording.

Steve Wozniak is an American engineer who co-founded Apple and designed the Apple I in 1976 and Apple II in 1977.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, introduced in a 2008 white paper and launched as software in 2009.

John Moses Browning was an American firearms designer whose work included the M1911 pistol and Browning Automatic Rifle, both adopted by the U.S. Army.

Larry Page is an American computer scientist who co-founded Google in 1998 and developed the PageRank search ranking method.

Igor Sikorsky was a Russian-American aviation pioneer whose VS-300, flown in 1939, established the practical single-main-rotor helicopter layout.

Gertrude B. Elion was an American pharmacologist who co-developed drugs such as 6-mercaptopurine and shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Leo Fender was an American instrument maker whose company introduced the Telecaster in 1950 and the Stratocaster in 1954, reshaping electric guitar design.

Sergey Brin is an American computer scientist who co-founded Google in 1998 after developing its search technology at Stanford.

Paul Baran was an American engineer whose 1960s RAND work described distributed networks and packet switching for survivable communication.

Federico Faggin is an Italian-American engineer who led the Intel 4004 design in 1970-1971 and created key silicon-gate methods for microprocessors.

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and inventor who patented dynamite in 1867 and left his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes.

Robert Moog was an American engineer whose 1964 Moog synthesizer made voltage-controlled electronic instruments practical for studios and performers.

George Westinghouse was an American inventor and industrialist who promoted alternating-current power systems in the United States in the 1880s.

Chuck Hull is an American engineer who invented stereolithography in 1983, a foundational 3D printing process, and founded 3D Systems.