A brief biography of Benjamin Franklin covering his career as a printer, philanthropist, inventor, and public servant.

The University of Omaha provides a cross-curricular lesson plan for 4-6th grades involving economics and language arts. "Elijah McCoy was an African-American inventor who successfully designed an automatic oil cup that may have inspired...

This is the PBS companion site to a video about Tesla. This particular page reviews Tesla's accomplishments and follows the events of his life that prove to be both tragic and inspiring. This comprehensive resource provides powerful...

Advance your way through everyday life by exploring the science all around you. Click on an innovation within each scene and answer each question to proceed to the next.

Travel through the decades to learn about the innovations that shape your life. Use the Decade Navigator below to start exploring. Transport yourself through the last 100 years to meet the innovations that have shaped our world.

This site provides information on Alexander Calder, the inventor of the kinetic sculpture known as the mobile, as well as detailed instructions on how to create your own butterfly mobile. Included are "Tips and Tricks" to making "a more...

A biography on audion inventor, Lee de Forest, from childhood on. Hyperlinks to additional information about the radio and broadcasting.

Read about the device used for measuring resistance in a circuit which was discovered in 1843, but had been invented a decade earlier. The inventor's name was not Wheatstone.

Gerd Binnig co-developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with Heinrich Rohrer. The STM allowed scientists entry into the atomic world in a new way and was a major advance in the field of nanotechnology. For their achievement,...

Anders Celsius is most familiar as the inventor of the temperature scale that bears his name. The Swedish astronomer, however, also is notable as the first person to make a connection between the radiant atmospheric phenomenon known as...

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...

This biographical site includes a link to a United States House of Representatives resolution recognizing Antonio Meucci as the inventor of the telephone. It also includes information on Bell's (1847-1922) later scientific work.

Walter Houser Brattain discovered the photo-effect that occurs at the free surface of a semiconductor and was co-creator of the point-contact transistor, which paved the way for the more advanced types of transistors that eventually...

Children's imaginations are infinite - so could they help draw up the ambitious projects that we need to fight the world's challenges? A group was asked to design inventions to make society a better place. Here's how they responded.

If you don't know that the incandescent light was a failure before it was a success, it's easy to write off some modern energy innovations like solar panels because they haven't hit the big time fast enough. Worse, the fairy-tale view of...

Gives a brief account of the inventors and developments that lead up to the creation of television.

A brief description to the patent filing and an excerpt from the patent request that Willis Johnson filed for his improvements in the egg beater. Included are drawings submitted with the patent request.

A collection of engaging quotations by scientists, inventors, writers, and statesmen about science and invention. With entries from modern-day scientists, such as Francis Crick, and from notable ancients, such as Archimedes.

An portrait of Alexander T. Brown the inventor of the Smith Premier typewriter.

(1847-1942) Inventor of the telephone

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist,...