Curated playlist
20th-century American inventors
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison clamped his teeth into a piano to hear it. He was deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other.
- Jamie Lee CurtisJamie Lee Curtis accepted a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in September 2021, and she did not sound like a person winding down. "I feel so alive, like I'm this 14-year-old person just…
- Henry FordHenry Ford's Model T came in black because black paint dried quickest. Earlier Model Ts also came in red.
- Wright brothersThe Wright brothers' 1903 patent did not claim an airplane. It claimed a system for controlling one.
- Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell was honored after his death in an unusual way. When his funeral ended, for one minute at 6:25 p.m. Eastern Time, every telephone on the continent of North America was silenced. The man being remembered is credited…
- Charles LindberghCharles Lindbergh stared at a huge field of glowing lights near Paris in May 1927 and took it for a giant industrial complex. He had just flown alone across the Atlantic, and the airfield he was hunting was not on his map. All he knew was…
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner proposed steering missiles with pigeons. The birds pecked at a screen showing the target.
- Philo FarnsworthPhilo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television, won a carton of cigarettes on a 1957 quiz show.
- Maxime FagetEngineer Max Faget decided a spacecraft returning from orbit should look nothing like an aircraft.
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise. She wanted code in plain English.
- John G. TrumpJohn G. Trump died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of February 1985, six days before a White House ceremony in his honor. His son John Jr. accepted the National Medal of Science on his behalf. President Ronald Reagan had awarded…