Curated playlist
American electrical engineers
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman's first big project, a BattleBots robot, was never built. The reading it inspired led him to OpenAI.
- Nikola TeslaNikola Tesla spent his last decades claiming he had built a death beam. He said it could stop an army 200 miles away.
- Gene CernanGene Cernan wrote his daughter's initials in the lunar dust before leaving the Moon. He was the last person there.
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison clamped his teeth into a piano to hear it. He was deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other.
- Eric SchmidtEric Schmidt ran Google while taking a base salary of just $1 a year. That pay lasted from 2004 through 2010.
- Samuel C. PhillipsSamuel C. Phillips froze the Minuteman missile's design knowing its range was 1,000 miles short.
- Satya NadellaOn the 4th of February 2014, Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would become its chief executive. He was the third person to hold that job, following Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The choice put a Hyderabad-born engineer at the head of…
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia in a Denny's booth, where he once worked as a dishwasher. Three engineers pooled $600.
- Ronald Evans (astronaut)Ronald Evans is the last person to orbit the Moon alone. He circled it 75 times while two crewmates walked below.
- Jerome WiesnerJerome Wiesner, Kennedy's science advisor, told Wernher von Braun "No, that's no good" in front of the press.
- Menachem Mendel SchneersonMenachem Mendel Schneerson, known to his followers as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, handed out dollar bills every Sunday in Brooklyn. From 1986, he stood outside his office and greeted a line of visitors one by one. Each person received a dollar…
- Wat MisakaWat Misaka played for the New York Knicks in 1947, then quit basketball to become an engineer.
- 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…