Neil Armstrong
Astronaut, engineer and symbol of one of man's crowning technological achievements.
Willis Haviland Carrier
Paved the way for refrigeration to become commonplace, creating a scenario by which comfort no longer depended on the outdoor climate.
George Washington Carver
Almost single-handedly saved southern agriculture by developing uses for peanuts, pecans, and soybeans beyond simple human consumption.
William Coolidge
Perfected a commercializable X-ray tube and changed the face of medicine on a wide scale.
Seymour Cray
Created the first supercomputer and paved the way for the digitalization of our world.
Thomas Edison
Defined what it means to be an inventor creating a workable light bulb, phonograph, and many others.
Few single achievements have the scale of impact Ford's affordable automobile has had, but on a less positive note, his assembly line allowed us to accept an education system that produces workers who can "pull one lever". Although his business sense allowed him to pay that worker enough to buy his product, many others have not followed suit, and the assembly line paved the way for the continued commoditization of people that the abolishment of slavery was supposed to end.
Grace Murray Hopper
Co-creator of the COBOL programming language and inventor of the computer compiler which allowed for the development of more logical programming languages that could still use the same microprocessor for execution.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Einstein theorized, Bohr hypothesized, but even Bohr's ambitious pupil Heisenberg could not do what Oppenheimer did: weaponize Fermi's nuclear reaction. It changed the world, literally.
Eli Whitney
The cotton gin completely changed the foundation of the economy of agriculture in the South.
Five notable foreign-born engineers
Enrico Fermi: The controlled nuclear reaction.
Robert Fulton: The steam engine.
Guglielmo Marconi: Wireless communication.
Nikola Tesla: The induction motor and commercialization of AC power.
Leonardo da Vinci: Because I love Leonardo da Vinci and every engineer I know owes a debt of gratitude to him.
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| The first engineer |
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