American inventor Lee De Forest was a pioneer of radio and motion pictures. He received more than 300 patents over the course of his lifetime, the most important of which was for a three-electrode vacuum tube, or triode, that he called...

Read this homage to Granville Woods, whose inventions and improvements to the railway system not only made railroad travel safer, but also made the New York City railway system a possibility.

Willem Einthoven invented a string galvanometer that lead to the electrocardiogram, which measures heart activity. For his discovery, Einthoven was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924.

John Ambrose Fleming was an electronics pioneer who invented the oscillation valve, or vacuum tube, a device that would help make radios, televisions, telephones and even early electronic computers possible. A brilliant innovator,...

For a man whose career involved the entire known universe, John Kraus had a remarkably insular upbringing. He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics, all at the...

William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, was one of the most eminent scientists of the nineteenth century and is best known today for inventing the international system of absolute temperature that bears his name. He made contributions to...

Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser. Ironically, Maiman's first paper announcing this momentous achievement, which many other scientists had been racing to complete themselves, was rejected. Since then, however, lasers...