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Who invented what, and when: from the printing press to the World Wide Web.
31 of 31 inventions & inventors
Johannes Gutenberg, c. 1440
Gutenberg's press with metal movable type made books cheap and fast to produce; the Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455) was its first major book. It spread literacy and ideas across Europe.
Zacharias Janssen, c. 1590; improved by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Early compound microscopes appeared in the Netherlands around 1590. Leeuwenhoek's powerful single-lens microscopes (1670s) revealed bacteria and other microorganisms for the first time.
Hans Lippershey, 1608
The Dutch spectacle-maker Lippershey applied for the first telescope patent; Galileo improved it in 1609 and used it to discover Jupiter's moons.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, 1714
Fahrenheit made the first reliable mercury thermometer and the Fahrenheit scale (1724). Anders Celsius proposed the centigrade (Celsius) scale in 1742.
James Watt, 1769
Thomas Newcomen built a working steam engine in 1712; Watt's separate condenser made it far more efficient, powering the Industrial Revolution. The unit of power, the watt, is named after him.
Edward Jenner, 1796
Jenner showed that infecting people with mild cowpox protected them from smallpox. The word 'vaccine' comes from the Latin for cow (vacca). Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.
Alessandro Volta, 1800
Volta's 'voltaic pile' of zinc and copper discs gave the first steady electric current. The unit of voltage, the volt, is named after him.
George Stephenson, 1825
Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive (1804), but Stephenson's engines ran the first public railway (Stockton–Darlington, 1825); his Rocket won the Rainhill Trials (1829).
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, 1826; Louis Daguerre, 1839
Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph (c. 1826). Daguerre's daguerreotype process (1839) made photography practical.
Michael Faraday, 1821–1831
Faraday showed electromagnetic rotation (1821) and discovered electromagnetic induction (1831), the principle behind electric generators and transformers.
Samuel Morse, 1837–1844
Morse developed a single-wire telegraph and the dot-dash Morse code; the first long-distance message, 'What hath God wrought', was sent in 1844.
William Morton, 1846
Morton gave the first public demonstration of ether anaesthesia during surgery in Boston, making painless operations possible.
Alfred Nobel, 1867
Nobel made nitroglycerine safer to handle by mixing it with an absorbent material. His fortune from explosives funded the Nobel Prizes.
Alexander Graham Bell, 1876
Bell received the first US patent for the telephone in 1876. His first words over it were reportedly 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you'.
Thomas Edison, 1877
The first machine to record and play back sound. Edison held over 1,000 US patents.
Thomas Edison (and Joseph Swan), 1879
Edison in the USA and Swan in England independently made long-lasting incandescent bulbs using a carbon filament.
Karl Benz, 1885–86
Benz's three-wheeled Motorwagen, patented in 1886, is considered the first practical car powered by an internal combustion engine.
Rudolf Diesel, 1893–97
An engine that ignites fuel by compression instead of a spark, more efficient than petrol engines; widely used in trucks, ships and trains.
Guglielmo Marconi, 1895–1901
Marconi sent the first wireless signal across the Atlantic in 1901. Nikola Tesla and Jagadish Chandra Bose also did important early work on radio waves.
Wilhelm Röntgen, 1895
Discovered by accident while working with cathode-ray tubes; Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901).
Wright brothers (Orville and Wilbur), 1903
Made the first controlled, powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903; it lasted 12 seconds.
John Logie Baird, 1926
Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in London; Philo Farnsworth (USA) developed the fully electronic system that replaced Baird's mechanical one.
Alexander Fleming, 1928
The first antibiotic. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain made it into a usable medicine in the 1940s.
Frank Whittle (UK) and Hans von Ohain (Germany), 1930s
Both developed jet engines independently; the first jet-powered flight was a German aircraft in 1939.
Charles Babbage (design, 1830s); first electronic computers in the 1940s
Babbage designed the Analytical Engine and is called the father of the computer; Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm for it. ENIAC (1945) was among the first general-purpose electronic computers.
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, 1947
Invented at Bell Labs, it replaced bulky vacuum tubes and made modern electronics possible. The inventors shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Theodore Maiman, 1960
Built the first working laser using a ruby crystal. Lasers are now used in surgery, barcode scanners, fibre-optic communication and cutting metal.
Intel (Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin and others), 1971
The Intel 4004 put a whole computer processor on a single chip, leading to personal computers and smartphones.
Martin Cooper, Motorola, 1973
Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call in New York in 1973.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, 1974
Their TCP/IP protocols let different networks connect into one 'network of networks'; ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on 1 January 1983.
Tim Berners-Lee, 1989
Proposed at CERN in Switzerland; he created the first web browser and website (1991). The web runs on top of the internet.
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