Industrial (1700-1900)
44 inventions
Steam Engine
Watt improved Thomas Newcomens 1712 engine, making it 75% more efficient. The separate condenser was...
Electric Battery
The voltaic pile was the first device to produce a continuous electrical current. Built from alterna...
Telephone
Bell filed his patent hours before Elisha Gray filed a similar one. The first words transmitted were...
Light Bulb
Edison did not invent the light bulb but made it practical with a carbonized bamboo filament lasting...
Automobile
Benz built the first true automobile with an internal combustion engine. His wife Bertha took the fi...
Dynamite
Nobel invented it as a safer alternative to nitroglycerin. He used diatomaceous earth to stabilize t...
Vaccine
Jenner observed that milkmaids who had cowpox never got smallpox. He tested this by infecting a boy ...
X-Ray
Rontgen discovered them accidentally while experimenting with cathode rays. He called them X-rays be...
Radio
Marconi built on the theoretical work of Maxwell and Hertz. He transmitted a signal across the Atlan...
Internal Combustion Engine
Ottos four-stroke engine remains the basis of most car engines today. He built on earlier work by Le...
Photography
Daguerreotypes required 10 minutes of exposure in bright sunlight. Earlier, Nicephore Niepce capture...
Cinema
The first public screening was December 28, 1895 in Paris. 33 people paid to see workers leaving a f...
Refrigerator
Harrison built the first practical vapor-compression refrigerator. Earlier ice boxes used harvested ...
Anesthesia
Morton demonstrated ether anesthesia publicly at Massachusetts General Hospital. Before anesthesia, ...
Railway Locomotive
Stephensons Rocket of 1829 proved steam locomotives were practical. Railways transformed Britain and...
Sewing Machine
Howe won a patent infringement case against Isaac Singer, who commercialized it better. The foot tre...
Electric Motor
Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic rotation, the principle behind all electric motors. He was a bo...
Battery (Rechargeable)
Plante invented the lead-acid battery, still used in cars today. Rechargeable batteries made electri...
Wind Turbine
Blyth built the first wind turbine to light his holiday home. Poul la Cour built a turbine in Denmar...
Stethoscope
Laennec rolled up a tube of paper to avoid pressing his ear against a womans chest. Before this, doc...
Chronometer
Harrison spent 31 years building clocks accurate enough for longitude calculation. H1 through H4 pro...
Cotton Gin
Whitneys invention made short-staple cotton profitable, ironically expanding slavery in the American...
Steel (Bessemer)
The Bessemer process made steel affordable for the first time. Blew air through molten iron to remov...
Concrete (Portland)
Portland cement is the most used material on Earth after water. Romans had concrete that was actuall...
Aluminum Smelting
Aluminum was once more valuable than gold. Napoleon III served his most honored guests with aluminum...
Dynamo
Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, converting mechanical motion into electricity. The dyn...
Smallpox Vaccine
Jenners vaccine was the worlds first vaccine. Smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people in the...
Anesthesia (Ether)
The Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital is where surgery changed forever. Morton demonstrat...
Aspirin
Hippocrates knew willow bark relieved pain 2,400 years earlier. Hoffmann synthesized acetylsalicylic...
Barbed Wire
Called the devils rope by Native Americans. Enabled the fencing of the open range in the American We...
Elevator
Otis demonstrated his safety elevator at the 1854 New York World Fair, cutting the rope himself. Bef...
Steel Plow
Midwestern soil stuck to cast-iron plows. Deere made a plow from a broken sawblade that soil would n...
Aspirin detail
See Aspirin main entry....
Telegraph
Samuel Morse was a successful portrait painter before he turned to electrical communication. With Al...
Typewriter
Sholes, a Milwaukee printer and newspaperman, patented a practical typewriter in 1868 with Carlos Gl...
Phonograph
Edison recorded sound by pressing a vibrating stylus into tinfoil wrapped around a rotating cylinder...
Bicycle
Karl Drais rode his running machine, a wooden two wheeler without pedals, through Mannheim in 1817. ...
Hot Air Balloon
Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, sons of a paper maker, launched an unmanned balloon a...
Pasteurization
Pasteur showed that gently heating wine to around 55 degrees Celsius killed the microbes that spoile...
Lightning Rod
Franklin proposed a pointed iron rod connected to the ground to carry lightning safely past building...
Spinning Jenny
Hargreaves, a Lancashire weaver, built a multi spindle spinning frame around 1764 that let one worke...
Seed Drill
Tull, a Berkshire farmer, built a horse drawn seed drill that sowed seeds in neat rows at a set dept...
Mercury Thermometer
Fahrenheit, an instrument maker born in Danzig and working in Amsterdam, made the first reliable mer...
Hypodermic Syringe
Edinburgh physician Alexander Wood developed a syringe with a hollow needle in 1853 to inject morphi...