William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong CB, FRS was an effective Tyneside industrialist who founded the Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing empire. Armstrong was responsible for developing the hydraulic accumulator. Where water press...

Elisha Graves Otis was an American industrialist, founder of the Otis Elevator Company, and inventor of a safety device that prevents elevators from falling if the hoisting cable fails. At the age of 40, while he was cleaning up the fact...

Sir Henry Bessemer was an English engineer, inventor, and businessman. Bessemer's name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel. Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for th...

Samuel Colt was an American inventor and industrialist from Hartford, Connecticut. He founded Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (today, Colt's Manufacturing Company), and made the mass production of the revolver commercially via...

Henri Nestlé was a German-born Swiss confectioner and the founder of Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage company, as well as one of the main creators of condensed milk. Before Nestlé turned 22 in 1836, he had completed a four-y...

Antoine-Joseph (known as Adolphe) Sax was a Belgian musical instrument designer, best known for inventing the saxophone. Having left school, Sax began to experiment with new instrument designs. In 1841, Sax relocated permanently to Paris an...

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the An...

Alphonse Eugène Beau de Rochas was a French engineer who originated the principle of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine. His achievement lay partly in his emphasizing the previously unappreciated importance of compressing the fuel–a...

Ernst Werner von Siemens was a German inventor and industrialist. He is world known for his advances in various technologies, and chose to work on perfecting technologies that have already been established. Siemens invented a telegraph that...

Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, invented the gyroscope, and disc...

John Henry "Professor" Pepper was a British scientist and inventor who toured the English-speaking world with his scientific demonstrations. He entertained the public, royalty, and fellow scientists with a wide range of technological innova...

Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir was a Belgian engineer who developed the internal combustion engine in 1859. Prior designs for such engines were patented as early as 1807, but none were commercially successful. Lenoir's engine was commercialized...

Eadweard Muybridge is often called the father of the motion picture because of his photographic studies of animal motion. He began his career as a landscape photographer, and always considered himself more an artist than a scientist, altho...

John Stith Pemberton was an American pharmacist who is best known for being the founder of Coca-Cola. In May 1886, he developed an early version of a beverage that would later become world-famous as Coca-Cola, but sold his rights to the dri...

Nikolaus August Otto was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented (e.g. by Étienne Lenoir) these were not...