Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen

Famous for constructing The Turk, a chess-playing automaton later revealed to be a hoax, Kempelen was also a Hungarian author and inventor with Irish ancestors, born in Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary, Habsburg...

Philipp Matthäus Hahn

Designer of the first functional mechanical calculator, Hahn was born on 25th of November, 1739 in Scharnhausen, Esslingen, as the second of ten children in a family of a pastor. From 1749...

Michael Faraday

A father of electromagnetism and electronics, Faraday studied the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a DC electric current. While conducting these studies, he established the basis for the electromagnetic field concept...

Ramon Llull

A pioneer of computation theory, Llull was a Majorcan writer and philosopher who wrote the first major work of Catalan literature. Recently-surfaced manuscripts show him to have anticipated, by several centuries, prominent...

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege

Considered one of the founders of modern logic, Frege made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. As a philosopher, he is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for...

Shaun Wylie

A key member of Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, Wylie worked alongside Alan Turing on solving the Enigma machine as used by the German Navy. He was born in Oxford, England, the...

Jerzy Witold Różycki

Inventor of the "clock" method for determining Enigma rotor positions, Różycki was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma-machine ciphers. He was born in what is now Ukraine,...

Dorothy Du Boisson

Operator of the prototype Colossus and the "Mark 2" Colossi at Bletchley Park, Du Boisson is recognized for her role in the wartime codebreaking effort. She joined the WRNS in 1943 and...

Samuel Finley Breese Morse

Co-inventor of Morse code and contributor to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system, Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. After attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Yale...

Thomas Alva Edison

Credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications, Edison also developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera,...

Charles Babbage

Designer of the first mathematical computer, Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display...

Herman Hollerith

Inventor of the punched card, Hollerith was a German-American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the...

Samuel Hawks Caldwell

Best known for his contributions to early computers, Caldwell was an American electrical engineer who completed his degrees in electrical engineering at MIT. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical Characteristics and Theory...

Jan Aleksander Rajchman

Conceiver of the first read-only memory and developer of the selectively addressable storage tube, Rajchman was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. Although he was born in London, he received the...

John Ambrose Fleming

Inventor of the first thermionic valve or vacuum tube, Fleming transformed the foundations of modern electronics. After leaving the University of Nottingham in 1882, Fleming took up the post of "Electrician" to...

David Hilbert

One of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic, Hilbert's work laid the basis for recursion theory and later theoretical computer science. He was recognized as one of the most influential...

Karl Ferdinand Braun

Inventor of the cathode-ray tube, Braun built the first such device in 1897 — known as the "Braun Tube" in German-speaking countries. During the development of radio, he also worked on wireless...

Edvard Georg Raphael Scheutz

Co-developer of the Scheutzian calculation engine that produced the first tables calculated and printed by machinery, Scheutz made pioneering contributions to mechanical computation alongside his father, Pehr George Scheutz. He began his...

Dorr Eugene Felt

Inventor of the Comptometer, the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator, Felt built his first prototype during the US Thanksgiving holidays of 1884. Because of his limited amount of money, he used...

Giovanni Caselli

Inventor of the pantelegraph (a.k.a. Universal Telegraph or "all-purpose telegraph"), the predecessor of the modern fax machine, Caselli put the world's first practical operating facsimile machine ("fax") system into use. Pantèlègraph is...