Who invented something interesting

Let us know what you think. Did we leave anybody out? Call us biased, but we think the top slot goes to Thales of Miletus, who lived in the 6 th century BC. He was the father of Western philosophy and one of the first people to explain natural phenomena without reference to mythology—technically making him the world's first scientist too. He even invented mathematics.

How cool is that? Leonardo was an all-round genius. Not content with being a Renaissance artist and a visionary scientist, he also stands out as one of history's most brilliant engineers. Long before they were technically feasible, he invented the helicopter and the battle tank. He came up with designs for mechanical looms and hydraulic saws. He drew plans for submarines and robots. You've got a car. Just look at the picture to the right, of the the original Benz Motorwagen from Condensing the invention of cars to those six words leaves out a lot of detail and a few main characters.

It was Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach who designed the first four-wheel car with a four-stroke engine and Henry Ford who perfected the assembly line. But the long story short is that the car was a typical "invention" that was far too complicated for one person to conceive on his won. Speaking of building bikes, that's exactly what Orville and Wilbur Wright did before they became the first team to fly a heavier-than-air machine. But, as we've learned, every great inventor stands on the shoulders of giants.

When the Wright brothers asked the Smithsonian for all available information on the history of flight in , they opened a history that had begun with DaVinci's scribbling and continued all the way to the 19th century gliders of Otto Liliental.

But the Wrights solved one of the most nagging problems facing airplane developers -- stability -- by having "a single cable warp the wing and turn the rudder at the same time.

The "Farnsworth Invention" was named after Philo T. Farnsworth, the nominal father of television. But his invention was neither his nor an invention. Teams of scientists and tinkerers all around the world were working to build, essentially, a radio for images -- i.

One key was the cathode ray tube, a vacuum with an electron gun that beams images onto screen that can receive or transmit signals. But the cathode ray tube itself has so many fathers that it's difficult to say exactly who invented even the central organ of the television, much less the television itself. In , Farnsworth projected a straight line on a machine he called the Image Dissector, which is truly the basis for the all-electronic television.

But, unlike Edison, he was not as gifted at marketing, producing, and becoming a household name for his tweak. At the end of this section, Lemley lists four inventors who, yeah, okay, really were alone. But the funny thing about the exceptions is that they're almost all accidents.

Images above from top: the cotton gin patent by Eli Whitney; a Morse key; Edison's patent; the Benz patent; the Wright brothers take off, ; All credit: Wikimedia Commons. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.

At age 10, KK Gregory was playing outside one day in the cold. Her wrists began to hurt from the cold so she decided to find a way to keep both her hands and wrists warm during the winter.

In , she invented Wristies: fuzzy sleeves that can be worn underneath gloves to protect your wrists from the cold. She worked with her Mom to get the idea off the ground and now the product is sold worldwide. When Kelly Reinhart was just a child, her parents challenged her and her siblings to a fun game. They were to draw up a picture of an invention and the prize for the winner was to have a prototype made. Thinking of cowboy gun holsters, Kelly drew a thigh pack that would allow kids to carry around their video games.

Kelly and her family went through a few rounds of design improvements and officially got the idea patented in Interest in the idea grew quickly until Kelly sold her company at age nine. She eventually went on to start a non-profit organization to teach kids how to be inventors. George Nissen: Trampoline George invented the trampoline in at the age of In at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone. Among one of his first innovations after the telephone was the "photophone," a device that enabled sound to be transmitted on a beam of light.

George Washington Carver was an agricultural chemist who invented uses for peanuts and hundreds of more uses for soybeans, pecans, and sweet potatoes.

His contributions changed the history of agriculture in the South. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in The cotton gin is a machine that separates seeds, hulls, and other unwanted materials from cotton after it has been picked. Johannes Gutenberg was a German goldsmith and inventor best known for the Gutenberg press, an innovative printing machine that used movable type.

John Logie Baird is remembered as the inventor of mechanical television an earlier version of television. Baird also patented inventions related to radar and fiber optics. Benjamin Franklin was known for being an iconic statesman and a Founding Father.

But among his many other accomplishments was the invention of the lightning rod, the iron furnace stove or Franklin Stove , bifocal glasses, and the odometer. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile as many people mistakenly assume. But he did improve the assembly line for automobile manufacturing, received a patent for a transmission mechanism, and popularized the gas-powered car with the Model-T.

James Naismith was a Canadian physical education instructor who invented basketball in Herman Hollerith invented a punch-card tabulation machine system for statistical computation. Herman Hollerith's great breakthrough was his use of electricity to read, count, and sort punched cards whose holes represented data gathered by the census-takers.

His machines were used for the census and accomplished in one year what would have taken nearly 10 years of hand tabulating. Due to overwhelming public demand, we had to add Nikola Tesla to this list.

Tesla was a genius and much of his work was stolen by other inventors. Tesla invented fluorescent lighting, the Tesla induction motor, and the Tesla coil.