Inventors and Inventions

Taking existing telegraph technology as his cue, Brit Alexander Graham Bell used his experience working with mute children to come up with the harmonic telegraph - a system that could transmit different tones across wire using multiple reeds. His 'germ of a great invention' was boosted with help ...

So your Earphones have two earpieces you say? Well here's why. British scientist and engineering pioneer Alan Blumenlein invented stereo, because he thought the monophonic music of his day lacked realism, and patented the idea in 1933. A lack of interest from his employer EMI forced to him to wor...

You can find electric motors in everything from vacuum cleaners to eco-friendly cars these days, but they owe it all to Michael Faraday, who first came up with the idea in 1821. It was Faraday who proved the principle of electromagnetism by dipping a magnet into a pool of mercury and then feeding...

We know what you're thinking: it has to be American, surely? In fact the idea for the first programmable machine was dreamed up in 1812 by London-born boffin Charles Babbage, who dedicated his life to actually building the thing. Thanks to an unfortunate series of personal and financial problems,...

The invention of the lightbulb is normally credited to US inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who patented his discovery in 1879. The problem is he was beaten by a year by British whizz Joseph Swann, who even came up with the idea of a carbon filament bulb some 10 years previously. Swann successfully su...

There's nothing like a good war to stoke the fires of invention and WWII was brilliant at it. Alongside the bouncing bombs, ballistic missiles and corner-shot rifles, the jet engine stands tall (actually, flies high). Developed independently (obviously) by both the British and the Germans, it was...

The French would have you believe that they invented photography, thank to a certain Louis Daguerre (1834). However British snappers actually predate him with one, Thomas Wedgewood, creating pictures of insect wings using silver nitrate on leather in 1802. Daguerre was also in competition with Wi...

Credited with helping to end The Blitz in 1941, Radar was developed by Scotsman Robert Watson-Watt, who proposed that enemy aircraft could be detected by radio waves. The first successful radar test took place near Daventry in 1935 and later that year Watson-Watt was awarded a patent for his disc...

Facing a lawsuit over the origins of the iPod, iTunes and QuickTime in 2006, Apple turned to British inventor Kane Kramer for part of its defence. Kramer, it turns out, had actually come up with the idea for a portable digital music player - dubbed the IXI - in 1979, and even managed to patent it...

Bear with us. This might be a strange one to wrap your head around, but the world hasn’t always thought about time in the same way. Before the 1800s, different places around the world would keep their own time according to the rising and the setting of the sun. There was no universal time framewo...

James Ephraim Lovelock CH CBE FRS (born 26 July 1919) is a British independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system. In brutal layman's terms this means if we don't take ...

Richard Trevithick was a British inventor and mining engineer from Cornwall. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport, and his mo...

Andrew Vivian (1759–1842) was a mechanical engineer, inventor, and mine captain of the Dolcoath mine in Cornwall, England. In partnership with his cousin Richard Trevithick, the inventor of the "high pressure" steam engine, and the entrepreneur Davis Giddy, Vivian financed the production of the f...

Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet (27 December 1773 – 15 December 1857) was an English engineer, inventor, and aviator. He is one of the most important people in the history of aeronautics. Many consider him to be the first true scientific aerial investigator and the first person to understand the u...

Pioneered by Stephenson, rail transport was one of the most important technological inventions of the 19th century and a key component of the Industrial Revolution. Built by George and his son Robert's company Robert Stephenson and Company, the Locomotion No. 1 was the first steam locomotive to c...

Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) was an English inventor. He was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837. Together with John Ricardo he founded the Electric Telegraph Company, the world's first ...

Sir Charles Wheatstone /ˈwiːtstən/FRS FRSE DCL LLD (1802 –1875), was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for displaying three-dimensional images), and the Playfair cipher (an encryptio...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel FRS MInstCE (1806–1859) was an English civil engineer who is considered "one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history," "one of the 19th-century engineering giants," and "one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, [who] changed the f...

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Maxwell's equations for elect...

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics...

Francis Crick OM FRS was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick and Watson's paper in Nature in 1953 laid the groundwork for und...

Peter Ware Higgs (born 29 May 1929) is a British theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor in the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the mass of subatomic particles. In 2012 the fundamental particle he predicted in the 1960s was discovered at CERN’s Large Hadron Col...

AstraZeneca plc is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with its headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, England. It was involved in developing the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, and has earned global admiration for its decision to place global a...

Sir William Petty FRS (1623–1687) was an English economist, physician, scientist and philosopher. He first became prominent serving Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth in Ireland. He developed efficient methods to survey the land that was to be confiscated and given to Cromwell's soldiers. He ...