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Curated category

20th-century American engineers

  • Albert EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that…
  • 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.
  • 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…
  • Roger B. ChaffeeRoger Bruce Chaffee arrived in the world on the 15th of February 1935. His birthplace was Grand Rapids, Michigan. The family had moved there from Greenville…
  • 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…
  • 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.
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Robert R. GilruthRobert Rowe Gilruth was born on the 8th of October 1913 in Nashwauk, Minnesota. He moved to Duluth when he was nine years old and graduated from Duluth…
  • 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…
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Joseph Francis SheaJoseph Francis Shea was born on the 5th of September, 1925, in the Bronx borough of New York City. He grew up as the eldest son in a working-class Irish…
  • 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.
  • William AndersWilliam Anders took what many consider the most consequential photograph in human history, and he did it almost by accident.
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • 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…
  • Jerome WiesnerJerome Bert Wiesner was born on the 30th of May 1915 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Dearborn as the son of Jewish immigrants from Silesia.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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…
  • Maxime FagetMaxime Allen Faget was the engineer who decided that a spacecraft returning from orbit should look nothing like an aircraft.
  • 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…
  • 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…