George Washington Carver

It is rare to find a man of the caliber of George Washington Carver. A man who would decline an invitation to work for a salary of more than $100,000 a year (almost a million today) to continue his research on behalf of his countrymen.

Agricultural Chemistry

As an agricultural chemist, Carver discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more uses for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers to help them economically were his recipes and improvements to/for: adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes, ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder and wood stain.

Alexander Graham Bell - Biography

In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone.

Back to The History of the Telephone

In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone. In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company, and in the same year married Mabel Hubbard and embarked on a yearlong honeymoon in Europe.

Biography of Thomas Edison

Edison Light Bulb

Thomas Alva Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio; the seventh and last child of Samuel and Nancy Edison. When Edison was seven his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. Edison lived here until he struck out on his own at the age of sixteen. Edison had very little formal education as a child, attending school only for a few months. He was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own. This belief in self-improvement remained throughout his life.

Land, Edwin Herbert

Land, Edwin Herbert, 1909–91, American inventor and photographic pioneer. While at Harvard, Land became interested in the properties and manipulation of polarized light. He left Harvard and, in 1932, created Polaroid J Sheet, a polarizing material that was inexpensive and easy to fabricate. In partnership with George Wheelwright, a Harvard physics instructor, Land in 1937 founded the Polaroid Corporation, where he adapted polarized materials for sunglasses, 3-D movies, and military use. In 1947 he demonstrated a single-step photographic process that enabled pictures to be developed in 60 seconds; a color process was marketed in 1963, and a self-developing positive print followed in 1973. In the original Land process, a negative material was exposed inside the camera and then drawn out, while being squeezed against a layer of reagent and a positive material. After 60 (later 10) seconds the layers could be separated and the negative discarded. In the current Polacolor process, light makes a series of latent images on appropriate dye layers of the film sheet; when the picture is ejected from the camera, processing reagent activates the image in these lower layers, which reaches final form after several minutes. The resulting print is protected by a hard plastic film. (See photographic processing.) Holder of more than 500 patents, Land founded the Rowland Institute of Science in 1960 and devoted his time to it after his retirement from Polaroid in 1980.

See biographies by S. McPartland (1993) and V. K. McElheny (1999).

Kay, John

Kay, John, 1704–64, English inventor. He patented (1733) the fly shuttle, operated by pulling a cord that drove the shuttle to either side, freeing one hand of the weaver to press home the weft. Workers in the weaving industry who regarded Kay's invention as a threat to their jobs mobbed Kay and destroyed his model. Various factory owners duplicated his device but managed not to pay him a royalty. Kay went to France, resumed his work, and tried unsuccessfully to win recognition in England. Although he was the inventor of one of the most important principles of modern mechanical weaving, he died in poverty.

Jacquard, Joseph Marie

Jacquard, Joseph Marie (zhôzef' märē' zhäkär') [key], 1752–1834, French inventor, whose loom is of the greatest importance in modern mechanical figure weaving. After several years of experimentation, he received a bronze medal for his model exhibited at the Industrial Exposition at Paris (1801). In 1806 his perfected loom was bought by the state and declared public property, and he was granted an annuity of 3,000 francs and a royalty on all looms sold. The Jacquard loom, the first machine to weave in patterns, has had countless adaptations in the modern textile industry.

Ives, Frederic Eugene

Ives, Frederic Eugene, 1856–1937, American inventor, b. Litchfield, Conn. A pioneer in the development of orthochromatic and trichromatic photography and of photoengraving, he followed an earlier suggestion by James Clerk Maxwell and produced in 1881 the first set of trichromatic plates. In 1878 he devised the first practical halftone process of photoengraving, developing it in 1886 to the process which came into general use. Among his other inventions are the short-tube, single-objective binocular microscope; the parallax stereogram; and a process for moving pictures in natural colors. His son Herbert Eugene Ives,. 1882–1953, inventor and physicist, b. Philadelphia, was active in the development of television. He demonstrated the transmission via telephone wires of black-and-white pictures in 1924 and of color pictures in 1929. He made a number of important contributions to color science and invented the first practical artificial-daylight lamp.