Engineers are the people who have built our world. Everything we use today was at one point nothing but an idea in someone’s head, that was successfully designed and built. So who are the best engineers throughout history?
1512
Perhaps the most visionary man of all time, Leonardo foresaw everything from the helicopter to the tank to the submarine. Modern engineers have proven that many of his designs, including bridges, hang-gliders, transmissions, parachutes, and more would have worked had they been built. There have been few individuals in the history of engineering who have designed so many revolutionary devices that actually worked. Leonardo is, by far, the greatest engineer of all time.
1847
Edison is the most prolific inventor in history, holding a record 1,097 patents. He developed the phonograph, incandescent light bulb, stock ticker, motion picture camera and projector, and hundreds more. He also created the first electrical plant and distribution infrastructure. Without these inventions, modern life is almost inconceivable.
287 BC
With Archimedes it’s difficult to separate the legend from the man. The engineering feats he is rumored to have accomplished include a mirror death-ray and a crane capable of lifting and smashing Roman ships, although they probably never existed. He did improve the catapult, develop levers and pulleys, and invent the Archimedean Screw, a device used to raise water for irrigation or mining. He also calculated pi and developed many mathematical insights without which modern engineering would be impossible.
1856
Nikola Tesla is perhaps the greatest electrical engineer of all time. His inventions include fluorescent lighting, the Tesla coil, the induction motor, and 3-phase electricity. He developed the AC-current generation system comprised of a motor and a transformer. Some have said that he “invented the 20th century.” Unfortunately, he became something of a mad scientist in his later years, and died in obscurity, but his invaluable contributions are remembered today.
1564
Galileo was born in Florence, Italy in 1564 to a poor but noble family.
His parents recognised their child's innate intelligence and talents and so made sacrifices to have him educated. At his father's insistence, Galileo studied the profitable career of medicine. At the University of Pisa, Galileo became fascinated in a wide range of subjects. He was also critical of many of Aristotle's teaching which had dominated education for the past 2,000 years.
1847
Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the first practical telephone. Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876. In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.
1867-1871
A clear indication of engineering brilliance is when you essentially invent your field. Other pioneers of flight came before them whose work was invaluable, but it was the Wrights who truly created aeronautical engineering. In a time when people thought of the mechanics of flight as ground locomotion in the air, the Wright brothers saw it as something wholly new. Their development of the three axis control system was necessary to fly controllably. They were also the first to really look at propeller design and aerodynamics. Their work profoundly changed the world.
1867
Marya Sklodovska was the youngest of 5 children, born in 1867, Warsaw Poland. She was brought up in a poor but well educated family. Marya excelled in her studies and won many prizes. At an early age she became committed to the ideal of Polish independence from Russia which was currently ruling Poland with an iron fist, and in particular making life difficult for intellectuals. She yearned to be able to teach fellow Polish woman who were mostly condemned to zero education.
1955
Sir Tim Berners Lee, is a British physicist, computer scientist and MIT professor, credited for his invention of the World Wide Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.
1919
While much of Kalashnikov’s AK-47 was borrowed from other guns, his simplification of their designs to make a nearly flawlessly functioning rifle was his genius. The gun is cheap to manufacture, easy to use, and hard to break. It’s hard to argue with success, after 57 years the AK-47 is still in production, and there are dozens of different varieties from shotguns to sniper rifles and the familiar assault rifle. It is arguably one of the best guns in history, and definitely one of the most influential. After all, what other gun has African children named for it?
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