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Neil Alden Armstrong – became the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, at 10:56 p.m. EDT. He and “Buzz” Aldrin spent about two and one-half hours walking on the moon, while pilot Michael Collins waited above in the Apollo 11 command module. Armstrong received his B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University and an M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California. |
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Leonardo da Vinci – Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies – particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics – anticipated many of the developments of modern science. |
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Thomas Edison – Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime, earning him the nickname the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” The most famous of his engineering inventions was an incandescent light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the kinetoscope, a small box for viewing moving films. He also improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Edison was quoted as saying, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” |
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Edwin Howard Armstrong – His crowning achievement in 1933 was the invention of wide-band frequency modulation, now known as FM radio. Armstrong earned a degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1913. |
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Alexander Graham Bell – inventor of the telephone. He also worked in telecommunications engineering and medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. In 1888 he founded the National Geographic Society. |
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William D. Coolidge’s name is inseparably linked with the X-ray tube — popularly called the ‘Coolidge tube.’ This invention completely revolutionized the generation of X-rays and remains to this day the model upon which all X-ray tubes for medical applications are patterned. Coolidge graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1896, majoring in electrical engineering. |
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George de Mestral -attended the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, where he graduated as an electrical engineer. In 1955 the “hook and loop fastener” he created was patented under the name Velcro, which was derived from two French words: velour and crochet (“velvet” and “hooks”). |
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Rudolf Diesel – Though best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited heat engine that bears his name, the French-born Diesel was also an eminent thermal engineer. |
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Bonnie Dunbar – NASA astronaut who earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in ceramic engineering from the University of Washington and a doctorate in mechanical/biomedical engineering from the University of Houston. While working at Rockwell International, Dr. Dunbar helped to develop the ceramic tiles that enable space shuttles to survive re-entry. She has had an opportunity to test those tiles firsthand as a four-time astronaut, including a stint on the first shuttle mission to dock with the Russian Space Station Mir. |
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Reginald A. Fessenden – Canadian-born American physicist and electrical engineer who is known for his early work in wireless communication. After designing a high-frequency alternator, in 1906 he broadcast the first program of speech and music ever transmitted by radio. That same year, he established two-way trans-Atlantic wireless telegraph communication. |
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Yuan-Cheng Fung – Fung is widely recognized as the father of biomechanics, having established the fundamentals of biomechanical properties in many of the human body’s organs and tissues. He founded the bioengineering program at the University of California—San Diego. In November 2001 he became the first bioengineer to receive the president’s National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor. |
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Robert Hutchings Goddard pioneered modern rocketry engineering and space flight and founded a whole field of science and engineering. Goddard conducted static tests with small solid-fuel rockets at Worcester Tech as early as 1908, and in 1912 he developed the detailed mathematical theory of rocket propulsion. In 1915 he proved that rocket engines could produce thrust in a vacuum and therefore make space flight possible. He succeeded in developing several types of solid-fuel rockets to be fired from hand-held or tripod-mounted launching tubes, which were the basis of the bazooka and other powerful rocket weapons of World War II. At the time of his death, Goddard held 214 patents in rocketry. |
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Beulah Louise Henry was known in the 1920s and ’30s as “the lady Edison” for the many engineering inventions she patented, including a vacuum ice cream freezer, a typewriter that made multiple copies without carbon paper, and a bobbin-less lockstitch sewing machine. Henry founded manufacturing companies to produce her creations, making a fortune in the process. |
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Grace Murray Hopper, a computer engineer and Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, developed the first computer compiler in 1952 and the computer program language COBOL. Upon discovering that a moth had jammed the works of an early computer, Hopper popularized the term “bug.” In 1983, by special presidential appointment, Hopper was promoted to the rank of Commodore. Two years later, she became one of the first women to be elevated to the rank of Rear Admiral. After retiring, she spent the remainder of her life as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corp. Hopper received numerous honors over the course of her lifetime. In 1969, the Data Processing Management Association awarded her the first Computer Science Man-of-the-Year Award. She became the first person from the United States and the first woman to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1973. She also received multiple honorary doctorates from universities across the nation. The Navy christened a ship in her honor. In September 1991, she was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in engineering and technology. |
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Jack Kilby – Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000 for his work with the integrated circuit. Kilby received a B.S.E.E. (electrical engineering) degree from the University of Illinois in 1947 and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Wisconsin in 1950. |
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Elijah McCoy was a Black inventor who was awarded over 57 patents. The son of runaway slaves from Kentucky, he was born in Canada and lived there as a youth. Educated in Scotland as a mechanical engineer, he returned to Detroit and in 1872 invented a lubricator for steam engines. His new oiling device revolutionized the industrial machine industry by allowing machines to remain in motion while being oiled. This device, although imitated by other designers, was so successful that people inspecting new equipment would ask if it contained the “real McCoy.” |
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Guglielmo Marconi - Known as the “Father of Radio,” Marconi received many honors including the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909. |
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Arati Prabhakar – Currently a venture capitalist, from 1993-1997 Prabhakar was director of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, appointed by President Clinton. From 1984 to 1986, Dr. Prabhakar served as a Congressional Fellow in the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress where she wrote on microelectronics research and development for the House Science, Research and Technology Subcommittee. Dr. Prabhakar served for two years as Director of the Microelectronics Technology Office in the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where she had managed advanced electronics research since 1986. She created the Microelectronics Technology Office to drive research, development, and demonstration of advanced microelectronics technologies critical to national security, with an emphasis on dual-use technologies. She holds the distinction of being the first woman with a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology, and was also the youngest director of the institute. |
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Judith Resnik – Challenger astronaut, electrical engineer. Received a bachelors of science degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970 and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1977. |
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George Westinghouse – invented a system of air brakes that made travel by train safe and built one of the greatest electric engineering and manufacturing organizations in the United States. In 1886, he founded the Westinghouse Electric Co., foreseeing the possibilities of alternating current as opposed to direct current, which was limited to a radius of two or three miles. Westinghouse enlisted the services of Nikola Tesla and other inventors in the development of alternating current motors and apparatus for the transmission of high-tension current, pioneering large-scale municipal lighting. |
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Eli Whitney – American inventor, pioneer, mechanical engineer, and manufacturer, Eli Whitney is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin. He also affected the industrial development of the United States when, in manufacturing muskets for the government, he translated the concept of interchangeable parts into a manufacturing system, giving birth to the American mass-production concept. |
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Lonnie Johnson spent more than a decade in high-level posts within the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He was, in short, a rocket scientist, albeit one with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a master’s in nuclear engineering. But what sent his already high-flying career into orbit was the invention of an extremely popular toy: the Super Soaker. Johnson was working on creating an environmentally friendly heat pump when he hooked a high-pressure nozzle to his bathroom sink. Out shot a powerful jet stream of water, and Johnson immediately saw its potential as a squirt gun. After making successful prototypes for his daughter and neighborhood friends, he licensed the Super Soaker to Larami Corp. in 1989. Sales for the Super Soaker have totaled nearly $1 billion since its launch, and it continues to be one of the world’s top-selling toys. |