Inventions & Discoveries

Observed its antibacterial effect in 1928

Rosalind Franklin's data was crucial

Heat treatment reduces harmful microbes

Administered in 1885

Vaccines work through the immune system and have prevented millions of deaths.

In 1796, Jenner used material from cowpox to test protection against smallpox.

Microscopes transformed the study of cells, microbes, materials, and medicine.

Several inventors made important contributions

Made engines much more efficient

Ada Lovelace described an algorithm for it

Developed in the 1890s

Westinghouse helped commercialize alternating-current power systems, including technology licensed from Tesla. AC electrification involved…

Steam engines powered pumps, factories, locomotives, and ships in the Industrial Revolution.

It changed communication by making information travel much faster than a person or horse.

It represents letters and numbers with dots and dashes.

It was an optical network used before electric telegraph systems became widespread.

Her notes also described how a general-purpose machine could work with symbols beyond arithmetic.

Developed in the 15th century

Proposed at CERN in 1989

Many inventors contributed

Flew in 1903

Predicted missing elements

His 1796 experiment helped launch immunology

Discovered in uranium salts

Completed in the 1940s

Launched in 1957

Published in 1915

Introduced in 1839

Invented by Alexander Parkes

Developed in 1947

Demonstrated a working system in the 1920s

Demonstrated publicly in 1854

Patented an improved design in 1938

It was used in astronomy, navigation, and timekeeping in several cultures.

Magnetic compasses made it easier to navigate when landmarks or stars were not visible.

Movable-type printing transformed the speed and scale of book production in Europe.

His workshop in Mainz produced printed books in the fifteenth century.

Public clocks helped organize work, worship, markets, and urban life around visible hours.

Bicycles also influenced clothing, city life, recreation, and women’s independence.

Thomas Edison’s early device used a grooved cylinder to store sound vibrations.

Radio soon became a mass medium for news, music, sport, and emergency communication.

The idea of instructions encoded on cards later influenced computing history.

Transistors replaced bulky vacuum tubes in many devices and helped enable modern computing.

Telescopes changed astronomy by revealing moons, planets, nebulae, galaxies, and more.

Its beads or counters represent numbers on rods or grooves and remain useful teaching tools.

A map is a model, so scale and projection shape what it can show well.

Archives may hold paper, photographs, audio, digital files, and objects.

An object becomes more informative when connected to careful documentation and provenance.

Provenance helps establish context, authenticity, and ethical questions around cultural objects.

The web is one service that runs on the internet, not the same thing as the internet itself.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web in 1989 while working at CERN.

Different barcode systems encode numbers or other data with patterns of lines or squares.

Patent systems vary by country and require public disclosure of the invention.

A famous name can be useful, but it rarely tells the whole story of an invention.