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Famous Inventors

35 items

Invention stories are almost always wrong in the popular telling, usually because the person who commercialised something has outlived the person who built it in the historical record. Draw an inventor and read one proper account. The disputes are the interesting part, and several here were robbed in ways that are still argued about. Thirty-five figures across four centuries. School projects work well on this draw because the research has a natural shape: what, when, and who else claimed it.

What's on the Wheel

All 35 entries that will be loaded onto the spinning wheel

1Thomas Edison
2Nikola Tesla
3Alexander Graham Bell
4Guglielmo Marconi
5James Watt
6George Stephenson
7Richard Arkwright
8Eli Whitney
9Cyrus McCormick
10Johannes Gutenberg
11Benjamin Franklin
12Michael Faraday
13Karl Benz
14Henry Ford
15Rudolf Diesel
16The Wright Brothers
17Igor Sikorsky
18John Logie Baird
19Philo Farnsworth
20Charles Babbage
21Ada Lovelace
22Alan Turing
23Grace Hopper
24Tim Berners-Lee
25Douglas Engelbart
26Hedy Lamarr
27George Washington Carver
28Garrett Morgan
29Lewis Latimer
30Mary Anderson
31Josephine Cochrane
32Stephanie Kwolek
33Willis Carrier
34Percy Spencer
35Chester Carlson
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