Curated playlist
20th-century American engineers
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Nikola TeslaNikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljan, a village then in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia. His father wanted him to become a priest. Instead, this son of an Eastern Orthodox clergyman…
- Elon MuskElon Reeve Musk sold a video game he wrote himself at age twelve for approximately $500. The game was called Blastar, built in BASIC, and sold to a magazine called PC and Office Technology. That small transaction points toward something…
- Roger B. ChaffeeRoger Bruce Chaffee was thirty-one years old when he climbed into the Apollo 1 command module on the afternoon of the 27th of January, 1967. He was the youngest American astronaut ever assigned to a spaceflight mission, and he had never…
- Ed White (astronaut)Ed White took his last step back inside a spacecraft on the 27th of January 1967, and by that evening, he was gone. But the moment that defined his life came nearly two years earlier, on the 3rd of June 1965, when he floated free of his…
- Stuart RoosaStuart Allen Roosa orbited the Moon 34 times, alone, while his two crewmates walked on the surface below. No one was watching him through a television camera. No one was broadcasting his name. Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell were getting…
- Gus GrissomGus Grissom was born in Mitchell, Indiana, on the 3rd of April 1926, the son of a railroad signalman and a homemaker. His nickname came from a friend who misread "Griss" upside down on a scorecard. That accidental name would one day be…
- Alan ShepardAlan Bartlett Shepard Jr. awoke at 01:10 on the 5th of May 1961, ate a breakfast of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and scrambled eggs, then climbed into a spacecraft perched atop a Redstone rocket. He had been strapped into…
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison kept his own deafness a mystery, inventing elaborate false stories about how he lost his hearing. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other. To enjoy a piano or a music player, he clamped his teeth…
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg grew up in a household where mathematics and computing were simply the texture of daily life. His father Eugene was a mathematics professor at SUNY Buffalo. His mother Evelyn was a computer science researcher. Even his…
- Jack SwigertJack Swigert was born on the 30th of August, 1931, in Denver, Colorado, and he died on the 27th of December, 1982, seven days before he was supposed to be sworn into Congress. In between those two dates sits one of the stranger American…
- Neil ArmstrongNeil Armstrong set his left boot on the lunar surface at 02:56 UTC on the 21st of July 1969, and said seven words that an estimated 530 million people heard live: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Those 530…
- Robert SeamansRobert Channing Seamans Jr. was born on the 30th of October 1918 in Salem, Massachusetts. He attended Lenox School in Lenox, Massachusetts before earning a Bachelor of Science degree from Harvard University in 1940. His academic path…
- David ScottDavid Randolph Scott was born on the 6th of June 1932 at Randolph Field, near San Antonio, Texas. His middle name came directly from that base, a fitting detail for a man whose identity would be shaped at every turn by the places and…
- Henry FordHenry Ford once wrote that any customer could have a car painted any color he wanted, so long as it was black. The line has outlived almost everything else about him. The man who said it was born on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan,…
- Robert R. GilruthRobert Rowe Gilruth was born on the 8th of October 1913, in Nashwauk, Minnesota, a town so small that most Americans have never heard of it. He died on the 17th of August 2000, in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the age of 86. Between those…
- Thomas J. Kelly (aerospace engineer)Thomas Joseph Kelly was born on the 14th of June 1929 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in Merrick, a middle-class neighborhood where parents compared their children's grades to his own. Teachers at Wellington C. Mepham High School…
- Wright brothersThe Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, filed a U.S. patent in March 1903, months before they had flown a powered aircraft. The document did not claim to have invented a flying machine at all. Instead it claimed something narrower: a…
- Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)Arthur Lee Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959, and the computers of his era had almost no memory to spare. Working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, Samuel faced a problem that would define the rest of the century: how do…
- Deke SlaytonDeke Slayton was born on the 1st of March 1924, on a farm near Leon, Wisconsin, and by 1959 he was one of the seven most famous test pilots in America. He had flown combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and Imperial Japan. He had…
- Hans Albert EinsteinHans Albert Einstein was born on the 14th of May 1904 in Bern, Switzerland, in the shadow of a name that would follow him everywhere. His father worked as a clerk at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property that year, far from…
- Samuel C. PhillipsSamuel C. Phillips was a general who flew fighters over occupied Europe, helped design the missiles that defined the Cold War, and then ran the program that put Americans on the Moon. Not bad for the son of an electrician from…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had done something almost no individual in history can claim: he invented an entirely…
- Joseph Francis SheaJoe Shea helped decide how America would reach the Moon. Only months into his NASA career in 1962, he worked through competing proposals for the lunar landing approach. His analysis guided the agency toward the design every Apollo mission…
- James IrwinJames Benson Irwin told his mother, when he was about 12 years old, that he wanted to go to the Moon and might be the first person to do so. He was wrong about the first part. On the 30th of July 1971, Irwin became the eighth human being…
- William AndersWilliam Anders took what many consider the most consequential photograph in human history, and he did it almost by accident. On the 24th of December 1968, the Apollo 8 spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon for its fourth orbit, and…
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia at age 30 in a Denny's restaurant booth in East San Jose, California, and has led the company every single day since the 5th of April 1993. That diner was not a random choice. Huang had worked the graveyard…
- Ronald Evans (astronaut)Ronald Ellwin Evans Jr. is the last human being to orbit the Moon alone. On the 14th of December 1972, while his crewmates Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt descended to the lunar surface at Taurus-Littrow valley, Evans circled silently…
- Harrison StormsHarrison Allen Storms, Jr. was born on the 15th of July 1915, and by the time he died on the 11th of July 1992, just four days before his birthday, he had helped put human beings on the Moon. He was known inside North American Aviation…
- Jerome WiesnerJerome Wiesner once blurted out "No, that's no good" in front of the press, directly contradicting Wernher von Braun during a presidential visit to Marshall Space Flight Center. It was a breathtaking moment of public defiance from the man…
- Igor SikorskyIgor Sikorsky built a small rubber band-powered helicopter at age 12, long before the world had any reason to believe such machines could carry a person. That boyhood model, assembled in Kiev in the early 1900s, contained the seed of an…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- Cynthia DworkCynthia Dwork holds a black belt in taekwondo, and it turns out that discipline maps neatly onto her scientific career. Born on the 27th of June, 1958, Dwork became one of the most consequential figures in modern computer science by…
- Maxime FagetMaxime Allen Faget was the engineer who decided that a spacecraft returning from orbit should look nothing like an aircraft. That single, counterintuitive choice shaped every American crew vehicle that followed. Faget, whose surname is…
- Abe SilversteinAbe Silverstein named the Apollo program after the Greek and Roman god of light and the sun, a choice that would define one of humanity's greatest undertakings. He made that decision as part of his work at NASA headquarters in the late…
- Wat MisakaWat Misaka stood five feet seven inches tall and played point guard, and in 1947 he walked onto an NBA floor before any other non-white player had ever done so. His name is Wataru Misaka, and in the same year Jackie Robinson broke…
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise, ticking backward through every meeting. "Humans are allergic to change," she once said. "They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's…