Famous in STEM
Who’s inside
161 people who changed how we understand the world.
Every person in the series, with the chapter title and big idea from the book. Looking for someone to write a report about? Start here.
Showing all 158 chapters
-
Isaac Newton
1642–1727The plague year that changed physics
Big ideaThe force that drops an apple is the force that holds the Moon in orbit, and it obeys one simple rule.
-
Nikola Tesla
1856–1943The man who made electricity spin
Big ideaAlternating current, which can be sent hundreds of miles and turned into motion with nothing rubbing.
-
Marie Curie
1867–1934She boiled down tons of rock to find a glow
Big ideaSome atoms fall apart on their own and give off energy. She named it radioactivity and found two elements that do it.
-
Albert Einstein
1879–1955The patent clerk who bent time
Big ideaLight passes everyone at the same speed, so space and time must stretch to fit. Mass is frozen energy: E = mc².
-
Daniel Bernoulli
1700–1782The doctor who found that fast air pushes less
Big ideaAlong a smooth flow of fluid, where it moves faster, its pressure is lower. That holds up aircraft and presses racing cars onto the track.
-
Galileo Galilei
1564–1642He pointed a spyglass at Jupiter and found four moons
Big ideaTest ideas by measuring. Without air to slow them, all objects fall at the same rate, and the Earth is not the center of everything.
-
Michael Faraday
1791–1867The bookbinder’s apprentice who found electricity in a magnet
Big ideaMove a magnet near a wire and electricity flows. Most of the world’s electricity still comes from this.
-
Max Planck
1858–1947The reluctant revolutionary
Big ideaEnergy comes in packets. Hot atoms can give off light only in whole packets, and bluer light comes in bigger packets.
-
Stephen Hawking
1942–2018The man who made black holes glow
Big ideaBlack holes are not perfectly black. They leak a faint glow and, given enough time, evaporate.
-
Niels Bohr
1885–1962The goalkeeper who built the atom out of stairs
Big ideaElectrons can sit only on certain rungs around the nucleus. When one jumps down a rung, the atom gives off light of exactly one color.
-
James Clerk Maxwell
1831–1879Four equations, and light fell out of them
Big ideaElectricity and magnetism are one thing, and light is a wave of it. So are radio, X-rays and the signal to your phone.
-
Ole Rømer
1644–1710He timed a moon and caught light being slow
Big ideaLight takes time to travel. When you look at anything, you see it as it was, not as it is.
-
Ernest Rutherford
1871–1937The farm boy who found the center of the atom
Big ideaAn atom is almost entirely empty space, with nearly all its mass packed into a nucleus a hundred thousand times smaller.
-
Richard Feynman
1918–1988The physicist who drew the universe in squiggles
Big ideaEvery way a thing could happen counts a little. Add up all the possibilities and you get what we see.
-
Alessandro Volta
1745–1827He stacked coins and wet paper and the world lit up
Big ideaTwo different metals and something salty between them make electricity flow. Stack enough and you have a battery.
-
Benjamin Franklin
1706–1790The printer who pulled a spark from a storm cloud
Big ideaLightning is electricity, the same stuff as the spark from a doorknob, and a pointed metal rod can lead it safely into the ground.
-
Archimedes
c. 287–212 BCThe man who could lift the Earth, given a place to stand
Big ideaWater pushes up on anything in it with a force equal to the weight of the water pushed aside. A long lever multiplies a small push.
-
Heinrich Hertz
1857–1894The spark that jumped across the room
Big ideaMaxwell’s invisible waves are real. You can make them with a spark and catch them with a loop of wire.
-
Johannes Kepler
1571–1630He threw out a theory over eight minutes of arc
Big ideaPlanets move in ellipses, not circles, speeding up near the Sun. Their orbits follow three rules that Newton later explained with gravity.
-
Georg Ohm
1789–1854The schoolteacher who measured the push and the flow
Big ideaCurrent equals voltage divided by resistance. One short rule is behind the design of almost every circuit on Earth.
-
J. Robert Oppenheimer
1904–1967The man who ran the project that built the bomb
Big ideaSplit one uranium nucleus and it throws out neutrons that split more. A chain reaction can release the energy locked in matter, all at once.
-
Enrico Fermi
1901–1954He lit the first nuclear fire under a football stand
Big ideaSlow a neutron down and it is far more likely to be caught by a nucleus. With that, a chain reaction can be controlled.
-
James Chadwick
1891–1974He found the particle with no charge, in less than three weeks
Big ideaThe nucleus holds neutrons: particles as heavy as a proton with no electric charge. They explain atomic weights and make chain reactions possible.
-
Henri Becquerel
1852–1908The experiment that worked because the sun did not shine
Big ideaSome substances give off invisible rays with no help from anything. The atom has an energy source of its own.
-
J. J. Thomson
1856–1940The clumsy professor who found the first piece of the atom
Big ideaAtoms are not the smallest things. Inside every one are electrons, nearly two thousand times lighter than the lightest atom.
-
Thomas Edison
1847–1931The inventor who lit Wall Street and lost the current war
Big ideaA light bulb is useless without a system: a generator, wires, meters and a station to run it. He built the whole system, and then backed the wrong current.
-
Carl Friedrich Gauss
1777–1855The schoolboy who, the story goes, found the shortcut through a hundred numbers
Big ideaBefore you start the arithmetic, look for the pattern underneath it.
-
Blaise Pascal
1623–1662The young man who put the weight of the air to the test
Big ideaChance can be counted, and a column of air can be weighed.
-
Alan Turing
1912–1954He imagined the computer before anyone could build one
Big ideaOne machine can do any calculation, if you feed it the right instructions.
-
Leonhard Euler
1707–1783The nearly blind man who worked out almost half his mathematics in his head
Big ideaCorners minus edges plus faces equals 2, for every flat-faced solid without holes.
-
Paul Erdős
1913–1996The mathematician who lived out of a suitcase
Big ideaMathematics is done best in company, so go where the problems are.
-
Eratosthenes
c. 276–194 BCHe measured the Earth with a well and a stick
Big ideaTwo shadows, about 800 kilometers apart, are enough to measure a planet.
-
Pythagoras
c. 570–495 BCThe theorem is real; the man is mostly fog
Big ideaIn a right-angled triangle, the squares on the two short sides add up to the square on the long one.
-
Fibonacci
c. 1170–after 1240The customs official’s son who taught Europe to count with zero
Big ideaTen symbols and the idea of place value can handle any number there is.
-
Euclid
c. 325–265 BCThe textbook that lasted two thousand years
Big ideaStart from a few plain truths and prove everything else, step by step.
-
Girolamo Cardano
1501–1576The gambling doctor who wrote down an impossible number
Big ideaChance obeys arithmetic, and so, it turns out, does the square root of a negative number.
-
Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887–1920The clerk who mailed a hundred theorems to Cambridge
Big ideaSome people can see what numbers are doing before anyone can prove it.
-
Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749–1827He worked out the odds that the Sun will rise tomorrow
Big ideaProbability is common sense turned into arithmetic.
-
Bernhard Riemann
1826–1866The shy pastor’s son who bent space
Big ideaSpace itself can curve, differently in different places, and we can measure it from inside.
-
Pierre de Fermat
1601 or 1607–1665The judge whose margin riddle lasted more than 350 years
Big ideaTwo squares can add up to a square; two cubes never add up to a cube.
-
Katherine Johnson
1918–2020The astronaut would not fly until she had checked the numbers
Big ideaOnce the engine stops, a spacecraft is a thrown stone, and a thrown stone can be calculated.
-
Henri Poincaré
1854–1912He found the limits of prediction, and had to pay for the printing
Big ideaThree bodies pulling on each other can move in ways no simple formula can predict.
-
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646–1716He wrote every number with 0 and 1
Big ideaTwo symbols are enough to write any number, and the right symbols make hard thinking easy.
-
Ada Lovelace
1815–1852The poet’s daughter who saw what a computer could become
Big ideaA machine that follows instructions can work on anything you can write as symbols, not just numbers.
-
Terence Tao
born 1975The youngest gold medalist in the history of the Olympiad
Big ideaAmong the prime numbers, evenly spaced runs of any length you like are waiting to be found.
-
John Nash
1928–2015A short thesis on how rivals really behave
Big ideaIn any contest with a limited number of choices, there is a way to play, sometimes by mixing moves at random, where nobody gains by changing alone.
-
Georg Cantor
1845–1918He counted past infinity, and found more than one
Big ideaSome infinities are bigger than others, and there is a way to prove it.
-
John von Neumann
1903–1957He drew the plan that almost every computer still follows
Big ideaKeep the program in the same memory as the data, and one machine can do any job you can write as a program.
-
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736–1813The quiet man who found the parking places in space
Big ideaAround any two bodies in orbit there are five points where a third can keep pace with them.
-
Steve Jobs
1955–2011The college dropout who made computers friendly
Big ideaA computer should fit the person, not the other way around.
-
Bill Gates
born 1955The teenager who decided software was worth money
Big ideaSoftware is a product in its own right, sold separately from the machine it runs on.
-
Steve Wozniak
born 1950The engineer who did it with fewer chips
Big ideaLet the processor do the work and the machine needs fewer parts. Code is almost free to copy, so it often costs less than hardware.
-
Mark Zuckerberg
born 1984The sophomore who drew a map of who knows whom
Big ideaWrite down who is friends with whom, and the map itself becomes the product.
-
Kevin Mitnick
1963–2023The hacker who talked his way in
Big ideaThe weakest part of any computer system is a person who trusts a stranger.
-
Linus Torvalds
born 1969The student whose hobby now runs most internet servers
Big ideaGive away the core of an operating system and let thousands of strangers improve it with you.
-
Tim Berners-Lee
born 1955The software engineer who gave the Web away
Big ideaGive every document on every computer an address, a way to fetch it and a way to link it to others.
-
Grace Hopper
1906–1992The admiral who taught computers English
Big ideaLet people write instructions in words, and let a program turn the words into the machine’s numbers.
-
Gordon Moore
1929–2023The chemist who predicted fifty years of computing with one graph
Big ideaThe number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years, and has for half a century.
-
Robert Noyce
1927–1990The minister’s son who printed a circuit on a chip
Big ideaMake all the parts of a circuit in one piece of silicon and print the wires on top, the way you print a page.
-
Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf
born 1938 and 1943Two engineers who taught networks to talk to each other
Big ideaCut every message into numbered packets, let each one find its own way and reassemble them at the far end.
-
Edsger Dijkstra
1930–2002The twenty-minute café idea behind how maps find routes
Big ideaTo find the shortest route, always settle the nearest place you have not yet settled.
-
Jack Dorsey
born 1976The boy with the scanner who shrank a message to 140 characters
Big ideaA public message short enough to fit in a text, sent to everyone who chooses to listen.
-
Peter Thiel
born 1967The chess player who moved money by infrared
Big ideaPaying online is changing two numbers in a ledger. The hard part is proving who asked.
-
Elon Musk
born 1971The man who decided rockets should land
Big ideaA rocket that flies back and lands can be used again, and a car can run on a floor full of batteries.
-
Marc Andreessen
born 1971The student who put pictures on the Web
Big ideaA browser that shows images beside the words, and that ordinary people could download and use.
-
Shawn Fanning
born 1980The freshman whose music program emptied the record shops
Big ideaKeep one list of who has which file, and let people’s computers trade directly with each other.
-
James Gosling
born 1955The programmer who built an imaginary computer
Big ideaCompile a program once, for a machine that does not exist, and let every real machine pretend to be it.
-
Guido van Rossum
born 1956The Christmas hobby that became one of the world’s most popular languages
Big ideaA programming language should read like the writing of a clear thinker, with nothing in the way.
-
Michael Dell
born 1965The pre-med student who built computers to order in his dorm
Big ideaBuild each computer only after someone has ordered it, from standard parts that all fit together.
-
Richard Stallman
born 1953The programmer who would not sign the agreement
Big ideaSoftware should come with the freedom to study, change and share it, and a license can make that freedom stick.
-
Jeff Bezos
born 1964The bookseller who started renting out his computers
Big ideaComputing can be rented by the hour over the internet, like electricity, instead of bought by the box.
-
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
both born 1973Two graduate students who let the Web vote on itself
Big ideaA link from one page to another is a vote, and votes from important pages count more.
-
Jimmy Wales
born 1966The options trader who let everyone edit the encyclopedia
Big ideaLet anyone change any page, keep every version, and trust the crowd to fix mistakes faster than it makes them.
-
Larry Ellison
born 1944The dropout who sold IBM’s idea before IBM did
Big ideaKeep information in tables, link them by shared columns, and ask for what you want in a language that reads a little like English.
-
Alfred Nobel
1833–1896The man who read his own obituary
Big ideaAn explosion is an ordinary chemical reaction in a great hurry, and even that can be tamed.
-
Antoine Lavoisier
1743–1794The tax collector who weighed fire
Big ideaIn a chemical reaction nothing is lost and nothing is created. Weigh everything, and the books balance.
-
Dmitri Mendeleev
1834–1907The man who knew elements nobody had seen
Big ideaLine the elements up by weight and their properties repeat, like the days of the week.
-
Robert Boyle
1627–1691The earl’s son who pumped a jar empty
Big ideaSqueeze a gas into half the space and it pushes back twice as hard.
-
Adolf von Baeyer
1835–1917The chemist who put the blue in blue jeans
Big ideaA color is a molecule. Work out the molecule and you can build the color in a factory.
-
Fritz Haber
1868–1934The man who fed the world and poisoned the trenches
Big ideaPull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer. About half the people alive eat because of it.
-
Rosalind Franklin
1920–1958The photograph that showed the shape of life
Big ideaFire X-rays through a crystal and the pattern they leave tells you how the molecule is built.
-
Mario Molina
1943–2020The chemist who asked where the spray cans went
Big ideaA gas so stable that nothing on Earth destroys it will rise until the Sun breaks it apart, and then its chlorine eats the ozone layer.
-
Alice Ball
1892–1916The chemist who turned a useless oil into a cure
Big ideaA medicine your body cannot absorb is no medicine. Change the molecule, and it works.
-
Linus Pauling
1901–1994The man who worked out what holds atoms together
Big ideaA chemical bond is a tug of war over electrons, and you can put a number on how hard each atom pulls.
-
Dorothy Hodgkin
1910–1994The Oxford housewife who saw the shape of penicillin
Big ideaA molecule is too small to see, but the shadows it casts in X-rays can be turned into a map of its atoms.
-
Percy Julian
1899–1975The chemist who made medicine out of beans
Big ideaNature builds its steroid hormones on one frame of four rings. Find a cheap plant that makes the frame and you can build the rest.
-
Humphry Davy
1778–1829The showman who pulled new metals out of a battery
Big ideaElectricity can tear apart compounds that no furnace can touch, and inside them are elements nobody has seen.
-
August Kekulé
1829–1896The architect who dreamed a snake biting its tail
Big ideaAtoms in a molecule are joined in a definite pattern, and six carbon atoms can close into a ring.
-
Louis Pasteur
1822–1895The chemist who found left-handed molecules
Big ideaMolecules come in left-handed and right-handed forms, and living things can tell the difference.
-
Gertrude Elion
1918–1999The drug designer who built counterfeit keys
Big ideaBuild a fake copy of a cell’s building block, and a cancer cell or virus will pick it up and jam itself.
-
Svante Arrhenius
1859–1927The man who first did the arithmetic on carbon dioxide
Big ideaCarbon dioxide in the air traps heat, and the more of it there is, the warmer the ground.
-
Leo Baekeland
1863–1944The cobbler’s son who invented the first fully synthetic plastic
Big ideaSmall molecules can be linked into chains and nets to make a material that exists nowhere in nature.
-
Carl Scheele
1742–1786The apothecary who found oxygen and lost the credit
Big ideaAir is a mixture, and about a fifth of it is a gas that makes fire blaze and keeps animals alive.
-
Amedeo Avogadro
1776–1856The lawyer who learned to count molecules
Big ideaEqual volumes of any two gases, at the same temperature and pressure, hold the same number of molecules.
-
Tu Youyou
born 1930The pharmacist who read a 1,600-year-old prescription correctly
Big ideaA molecule from a common weed kills the malaria parasite, and Tu found it by keeping the extraction cool.
-
Stephanie Kwolek
1923–2014The chemist who would not pour the cloudy liquid away
Big ideaLine up stiff polymer chains side by side and the fiber they make is five times stronger than steel for its weight.
-
Henry Cavendish
1731–1810The shyest man in science, who found the lightest gas
Big ideaA gas fourteen times lighter than air burns with oxygen and leaves nothing behind but water.
-
Ahmed Zewail
1946–2016The chemist who filmed a bond breaking
Big ideaFlash a laser twice, less than a trillionth of a second apart, and you can photograph atoms in the act of changing partners.
-
Charles Darwin
1809–1882Twenty years of silence, then a letter from the tropics
Big ideaLiving things change over generations because the ones that fit their surroundings best leave the most offspring.
-
Gregor Mendel
1822–1884The monk who counted about 28,000 pea plants
Big ideaTraits are passed on in separate units that do not blend, and they follow the rules of chance.
-
Jane Goodall
1934–2025The secretary who went to live with chimpanzees
Big ideaChimpanzees make tools, have personalities and pass habits down the generations. The line between us and them is thinner than anyone thought.
-
Rachel Carson
1907–1964The writer who heard the birds go quiet
Big ideaA poison sprayed on a field does not stay there. It climbs the food chain and ends up in the eagle, and in you.
-
Carl Linnaeus
1707–1778The man who gave every living thing two names
Big ideaSort all of life into nested groups, and give every species one name of two words that works in every language.
-
Barbara McClintock
1902–1992The woman who watched genes jump in a cornfield
Big ideaGenes are not nailed to one spot on a chromosome. Some of them move, and when they land they can switch other genes on and off.
-
Alexander von Humboldt
1769–1859The man who climbed a volcano and saw the whole planet
Big ideaClimate, soil, plants, animals and people are one connected system. Change one and the others move.
-
Alfred Russel Wallace
1823–1913The collector who lost everything at sea and started again
Big ideaWhere an animal lives tells you where it came from. Barriers such as deep water and high mountains divide the living world into regions.
-
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
1632–1723The cloth merchant who found a zoo in his own mouth
Big ideaA drop of water and a scraping from your teeth are full of living things too small to see, and your own blood is full of tiny living cells.
-
E. O. Wilson
1929–2021The boy with one good eye who learned to speak ant
Big ideaAn ant colony acts like one animal with thousands of bodies, run by smells. Understanding it tells you how societies work, and why life needs room.
-
Dian Fossey
1932–1985The woman who lived alone in the mountain forest
Big ideaGorillas are shy, gentle family animals, and the way to learn about them is to behave like one.
-
George Washington Carver
c. 1864–1943The plant doctor who taught the South to rest its soil
Big ideaPeanuts and beans carry bacteria in their roots that pull fertilizer out of the air. Plant them between cotton crops and worn-out land comes back.
-
Lynn Margulis
1938–2011The biologist who found bacteria living inside you
Big ideaThe power plants inside your cells were once free-living bacteria. Complex life began when one cell swallowed another and did not digest it.
-
Thomas Hunt Morgan
1866–1945The skeptic who found a white-eyed fly
Big ideaGenes sit in a line along chromosomes, and you can map where each one is by breeding fruit flies.
-
Wangari Maathai
1940–2011The woman whose movement planted tens of millions of trees
Big ideaForests help hold the soil on slopes and keep rain soaking in. Where they are cut, soil washes away and streams often suffer; planting trees can help bring them back.
-
David Attenborough
born 1926The man who showed the whole planet to the whole planet
Big ideaFilm the living world honestly, with the science right and the wonder left in, and people will care what happens to it.
-
Robert Hooke
1635–1703The man who drew a flea the size of a cat
Big ideaPut a lens between your eye and the world and there is a second world underneath, full of structure nobody had suspected. He named its building blocks cells.
-
Mary Anning
1799–1847The girl who dug sea monsters out of a crumbling cliff
Big ideaThe layers in a cliff are pages of the Earth’s history, and the bones in them belong to animals that no longer exist.
-
James Watson and Francis Crick
1928–2025 and 1916–2004Two men, a borrowed photograph and a twisted ladder
Big ideaDNA is a twisted ladder whose rungs come in matched pairs, so each half can rebuild the other. That is how living things copy themselves.
-
Charles Henry Turner
1867–1923The high-school teacher who proved that insects can learn
Big ideaInsects are not little machines. Turner found evidence that bees see color, that moths hear, that cockroaches learn mazes and that ants steer by sight.
-
Alexander Fleming
1881–1955The untidy laboratory that saved millions
Big ideaA common mold makes a substance that kills bacteria and leaves human cells alone.
-
Edward Jenner
1749–1823The country doctor who listened to the milkmaids
Big ideaShow the body something harmless that looks like a deadly germ, and it learns to fight the real thing. Every vaccine since works this way.
-
Florence Nightingale
1820–1910The nurse who beat the army with a diagram
Big ideaCount the deaths, work out the rate and draw it so a general can see it in one glance. Numbers save lives.
-
Jonas Salk
1914–1995The summer the swimming pools reopened
Big ideaA virus killed with chemicals keeps its shape, so the body can learn to fight it without ever being infected.
-
Hippocrates
c. 460–370 BCThe doctors who wrote down their failures
Big ideaDisease has natural causes. Watch the patient, write down what you see and learn from what happens.
-
Elizabeth Blackwell
1821–1910Admitted to medical school as a joke
Big ideaHalf of all patients are women, and many of them would rather be treated by one. In 1849 the United States had exactly one woman with a medical degree.
-
Joseph Lister
1827–1912The surgeon who went to war against the invisible
Big ideaWounds go bad because living germs get into them. Kill the germs and the wound heals.
-
Virginia Apgar
1909–1974Five checks, ten points, one minute
Big ideaGive every newborn the same five quick checks and a score out of ten, so nobody has to guess how a baby is doing.
-
William Harvey
1578–1657The king’s doctor who did the arithmetic on blood
Big ideaThe heart is a pump, and the blood goes round and round. Count your pulse, do Harvey’s math and see why.
-
Andreas Vesalius
1514–1564The student who stole a skeleton by night
Big ideaIf you want to know what is inside a human body, open one and look. Do not take a dead Greek’s word for it.
-
Daniel Hale Williams
1856–1931The barber’s son who stitched the sac around a beating heart
Big ideaThe chest is not off-limits. A surgeon with clean hands and steady nerves can mend a wound next to a beating heart.
-
Christiaan Barnard
1922–2001Eighteen days with another person’s heart
Big ideaA heart can be moved from one body to another and beat on. The hard part is persuading the new body to let it stay.
-
Ignaz Semmelweis
1818–1865The doctor who found the killer on his own hands
Big ideaDoctors were carrying death from the autopsy room to the maternity ward on their hands. Washing them cut the deaths sharply.
-
Charles Drew
1904–1950The man who taught blood to travel
Big ideaTake the cells out of blood and the yellow liquid left behind can be stored, shipped and given to almost anyone in an emergency.
-
Helen Taussig
1898–1986The deaf doctor who listened to hearts with her fingers
Big ideaMany “blue babies” are blue because too little blood reaches the lungs. Build a detour and send more.
-
Rebecca Lee Crumpler
1831–1895The doctor whose face nobody remembers
Big ideaTeach a mother how to keep her children well and you have done more than a dozen doctors who arrive when they are sick.
-
Harvey Cushing
1869–1939The surgeon who made the brain a place you could go
Big ideaBrain surgery kills when it is fast and bloody. Go slow, stop every bleed, write everything down, and most patients live.
-
Paul Ehrlich
1854–1915Hundreds of tries for one magic bullet
Big ideaA drug can be a bullet that hits the germ and misses the patient. You find it by testing, and testing, and testing.
-
Galen
c. AD 129–216The gladiators’ doctor who was believed for 1,300 years, and wrong
Big ideaExperiment on the living body to find out what each part does. Then, unfortunately, write it all down so well that nobody checks it for a thousand years.
-
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
c. 980–1037The teenager who cured a king and wrote the book Europe studied for 500 years
Big ideaA medicine is only proven when it is tested, on people, in the right way. He wrote some of the first rules.
-
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
1806–1859The engineer who believed bigger was cheaper
Big ideaDouble a ship’s size and its cargo grows eight times while its drag grows only about four. Build big.
-
Gustave Eiffel
1832–1923The man who let the wind draw his tower
Big ideaShape a tall structure so the wind’s push is met by its own spread, and iron can stand 300 meters high.
-
James Watt
1736–1819The repairman who noticed where the heat was going
Big ideaKeep the cylinder hot and cool the steam somewhere else. The engine burns a third to a quarter of the coal.
-
Fazlur Rahman Khan
1929–1982The engineer who turned skyscrapers into tubes
Big ideaMake the outside walls do the work. A hollow tube resists wind far better than a frame of columns.
-
Emily Warren Roebling
1843–1903The woman who carried the Brooklyn Bridge in her head
Big ideaCables pull, towers push. Give each material the job it is good at and you can hang a road across a river.
-
Wernher von Braun
1912–1977The rocket builder who worked for two flags
Big ideaA rocket does not push against the air. It throws hot gas backward, and the gas throws the rocket forward.
-
George Stephenson
1781–1848The pitman who could not read until he was eighteen
Big ideaReplace the big boiler flue with twenty-five small tubes and the fire gets about four times as much surface to heat the water.
-
Lillian Gilbreth
1878–1972The mother of twelve who counted every step
Big ideaFilm a job, break it into its smallest motions, and throw away the ones that do nothing.
-
Sergei Korolev
1907–1966The prisoner whose name was a state secret
Big ideaThrow something fast enough sideways and it falls around the Earth forever. That is an orbit.
-
John Smeaton
1724–1792The man who built a lighthouse like an oak tree
Big ideaLock every stone into its neighbors and a tower of blocks becomes one solid thing that the sea cannot pull apart.
-
Hertha Ayrton
1854–1923The woman who found out why the lights hissed
Big ideaSmall whirlpools of fluid can build the ripples on a beach, and she hoped well-aimed pulses of air could push lingering poison gas out of a trench or dugout.
-
Claude Shannon
1916–2001The juggler who measured information
Big ideaEvery message, picture or song can be counted in yes-or-no answers. One answer is a bit.
-
Norbert Rillieux
1806–1894The engineer who boiled sugar with used steam
Big ideaSteam rising off one boiling pan still carries almost all its heat. Catch it and use it to boil the next pan.
-
Henry Ford
1863–1947The farm boy who made the work come to the worker
Big ideaKeep the worker still and move the car past him. Twelve and a half hours of assembly became ninety-three minutes.
-
Marc Isambard Brunel
1769–1849The refugee who, the story goes, learned tunneling from a worm
Big ideaDig a little, line the hole behind you, push forward. A shipworm does it in wood; a shield does it under a river.
-
Granville Woods
1856–1910The inventor who talked to a moving train
Big ideaA changing current in one wire stirs a current in a nearby wire without touching it. That gap can carry a message to a train at full speed.
-
Ellen Swallow Richards
1842–1911The chemist who mapped a whole state’s dirty water
Big ideaSalt in a river tells you how far you are from the sea. Too much salt tells you someone’s sewage is in it.
-
Rudolf Diesel
1858–1913The engine that lights its own fire, and the man who vanished at sea
Big ideaSqueeze air hard enough and it gets hot enough to set fuel alight by itself. The harder the squeeze, the less fuel is wasted.
-
Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya
1861–1962The engineer whose birthday is Engineers’ Day
Big ideaA dam turns four months of monsoon into twelve months of water, and a gate can open itself with no one watching.
-
Lee de Forest
1873–1961The man who put a gate in a beam of electrons
Big ideaA tiny voltage on a wire grid can throttle a large flow of electrons. A weak signal becomes a strong one.
No match. Try a shorter word, or clear the search.
Found someone interesting?
Their full story is in the book. Every chapter is a short, true biography with the science explained.
