Dean Lawrence Kamen is an American engineer, inventor, and businessman. He is known for his invention of the Segway and iBOT, as well as founding the non-profit organization FIRST with Woodie Flowers. Kamen holds over 1,000 patents.
A Segway is a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter device invented by Dean Kamen. It is a registered trademark of Segway Inc. It was brought to market in 2001 as the Segway HT, and then subsequently as the Segway PT.HT is an initialism for "human transporter" and PT for "personal transporter."
Garrett Augustus Morgan Sr. was an American inventor, businessman, and community leader. His most notable inventions were a type of three-way traffic light, and a protective 'smoke hood' notably used in a 1916 tunnel construction disaster rescue. Morgan also discovered and developed a chemical hair-processing and straightening solution. He created a successful company called "G. A. Morgan Hair Refining Company" based on his hair product inventions along with a complete line of haircare products and became involved in the civic and political advancement of African Americans, especially in and around Cleveland, Ohio.
James Roy Horner was an American film composer. He worked on more than 160 film and television productions between 1978 and 2015. He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements alongside traditional orchestrations, and for his use of motifs associated with Celtic music.
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was a French chemistry and physics teacher, and one of the first pioneers of aviation. He made the first manned free balloon flight with François Laurent d'Arlandes on 21 November 1783, in a Montgolfier balloon. He later died when his balloon crashed near Wimereux in the Pas-de-Calais during an attempt to fly across the English Channel. He and his companion Pierre Romain thus became the first known fatalities in an air crash.
The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials – watch dials and hands with self-luminous paint. The incidents occurred at three factories in the United States: one in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s; and one in Waterbury, Connecticut, also in the 1920s.
Alan Dower Blumlein was an English electronics engineer, notable for his many inventions in telecommunications, sound recording, stereophonic sound, television and radar. He received 128 patents and was considered one of the most significant engineers and inventors of his time.
Robert Noel Hall was an American engineer and applied physicist. He demonstrated the first semiconductor laser and invented a type of magnetron commonly used in microwave ovens. He also contributed to the development of rectifiers for power transmission.
A timeline of United States inventions encompasses the ingenuity and innovative advancements of the United States within a historical context, dating from the Contemporary era to the present day, which have been achieved by inventors who are either native-born or naturalized citizens of the United States. Patent protection secures a person's right to his or her first-to-invent claim of the original invention in question, highlighted in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution which gives the following enumerated power to the United States Congress:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Thomas Harris was a pioneering English balloonist who was killed in an accident. There is little information about his early career, but he invented the gas discharge valve, a device to release all the gas in a gas balloon to prevent the balloon from dragging after landing.
The United States Radium Corporation was a company, most notorious for its operations between the years 1917 to 1926 in Orange, New Jersey, in the United States that led to stronger worker protection laws. After initial success in developing a glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint, the company was subject to several lawsuits in the late 1920s in the wake of severe illnesses and deaths of workers who had ingested radioactive material. The workers had been told that the paint was harmless. During World War I and World War II, the company produced luminous watches and gauges for the United States Army for use by soldiers.
Slingshot is a water purification device created by inventor Dean Kamen. Powered by a Stirling engine running on a combustible fuel source, it claims to be able to produce drinking water from almost any source by means of vapor compression distillation, requires no filters, and can operate using cow dung as fuel.
Dr. Thomas J. "Tom" Fogarty is an American surgeon and medical device inventor. He is best known for the invention of the embolectomy catheter, which revolutionized the treatment of blood clots (embolus).
The death ray or death beam was a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon first theorized around the 1920s and 1930s. Around that time, notable inventors such as Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla, Harry Grindell Matthews, Edwin R. Scott, Erich Graichen and others claimed to have invented it independently. In 1957, the National Inventors Council was still issuing lists of needed military inventions that included a death ray.
William John Aloysius Bailey was an American patent medicine inventor and salesman. A Harvard University dropout, Bailey falsely claimed to be a doctor of medicine and promoted the use of radioactive radium as a cure for coughs, flu, and other common ailments. Although Bailey's Radium Laboratories in East Orange, New Jersey, was continually investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, he died wealthy from his many devices and products, including an aphrodisiac called Arium, marketed as a restorative that "renewed happiness and youthful thrill into the lives of married peoples whose attractions to each other had weakened."
Maurice Ward was a British inventor best known for his invention of Starlite, a thermal shielding material. He was a former hairdresser from Hartlepool, County Durham, England. Ward believed he should not sell his material directly or allow unsupervised research due to the potential for reverse engineering, and he maintained that he should keep 51% ownership of the formula for Starlite because he valued the material to be worth billions; this is believed to have stunted its commercial success. The formulation for Starlite, a technology which might have revolutionised the world of aerospace and materials science, may have been lost with his passing, although, he hinted during a radio talk show interview that his family might hold information relating to the invention. Starlite was reported to have been acquired by Thermashield, LLC from Ward's family in 2013.
Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, born Alexander Malinovsky, was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was a polymath who pioneered blood transfusion, as well as general systems theory, and made important contributions to cybernetics.
Michael Hughes, popularly known as "Mad" Mike Hughes, was an American limousine driver, professed flat-Earther, and daredevil known for flying in self-built steam rockets. He died on February 22, 2020, while filming a stunt for an upcoming Science Channel television series. Although a public promoter of the flat Earth model, following his death his public relations representative said that Hughes had only used flat Earth as a PR stunt to acquire funding for his rockets.
Katharina "Käthe" Paulus was a German exhibition parachute jumper and the inventor of the first collapsible parachute. At the time, 1910, the parachute was named "rescue apparatus for aeronauts". The previous parachutes were not able to fit in a case like apparatus worn on the back, thus Paulus' invention became of paramount importance for the Germans in the First World War and she produced about 7,000 parachutes for the German forces. During the First World War, Paulus created approximately 125 parachutes a week. She was also credited with inventing the "drag 'chute", an intentional breakaway system where one small parachute opens to pull out the main parachute.
William Nelson was an American inventor and an employee of General Electric in Schenectady, New York.
