Short answers, pulled from the story.
B. F. Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber (widely called the Skinner box), the cumulative recorder, the air crib (a climate-controlled infant box-bed), the teaching machine, and the verbal summator. He also developed Project Pigeon, a World War II guidance system that trained pigeons to steer missiles by pecking at images of targets.
Radical behaviorism holds that behavior is a consequence of environmental histories of reinforcement, not of inner mental states or consciousness. Skinner argued that what is felt or introspectively observed is not the cause of behavior; the organism's genetic and environmental history is the cause. This philosophy originated in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other approaches that made predictions difficult to test experimentally.
Noam Chomsky published a review of Verbal Behavior in the journal Language in 1959, arguing that conditioned responses could not explain a child's ability to produce and understand an infinite range of novel sentences. Chomsky called Skinner's account little more than word games. Behavior analysts countered that Chomsky had attacked a distorted version of Skinner's work rather than engaging with the book itself.
Walden Two, published in 1948, depicts a fictional experimental community in the 1940s United States where residents use operant conditioning to raise children and practice scientific social planning. Skinner argued that the community's approach produced greater happiness and productivity than conventional society. In 1967, Kat Kinkade and others founded the Twin Oaks Community using Walden Two as a blueprint, and the community still exists.
A June 2002 survey listed Skinner as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. Skinner held the Edgar Pierce Professorship of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 to 1974 and remained a professor emeritus there until his death on the 18th of August 1990.
Skinner and Charles Ferster identified several ways reinforcement can be arranged over time, published in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement. The main schedules are continuous reinforcement, fixed and variable interval schedules, and fixed and variable ratio schedules. Variable ratio schedules, in which reinforcement comes after an unpredictable number of responses, produce the highest and most steady rates of responding, a pattern seen in slot machines and many digital engagement systems.