Elisha Gray

Best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876, Gray is considered by some writers to be the true inventor of the variable resistance telephone, despite losing out to Alexander...

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,...

William Stanley Jevons

Constructed a logical machine called the Logic Piano, Jevons was a pioneering figure in both logic and economics. Jevons arrived quite early in his career at the doctrines that constituted his most...

Helmut Theodor Schreyer

Co-developer of the Z3, one of the first computers, Schreyer also developed an electrical circuit to convert decimal to binary numbers. He was a German inventor and the son of the minister...

Philip Stuart Milner-Barry

One of four leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park to petition Prime Minister Winston Churchill directly for more resources for their work, Milner-Barry was also a British chess player, chess writer, and civil...

Erwin Tomash

Early pioneer of computer equipment peripherals and co-developer of the ERA 1103 (UNIVAC Scientific), Tomash was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and graduated from the University of Minnesota with an...

Kathleen Booth (née Britten)

Credited with writing the first assembly language and the design of the assembler and autocode (ARC and APE(X)C) for the Birkbeck College computers, Booth made foundational contributions to computer programming. Born in...

Francis Wilton Reichelderfer

Instrumental in bringing modern computerized technology to weather forecasting, Reichelderfer presided over a revolutionary era in the history of the National Weather Service. From 1938 to 1963, he guided the organization through...

Alice Rowe Burks

One of 75 females employed as a "woman computer" performing mathematical calculations before electronic computers became commercially available, and co-publisher of the definitive Who Invented the Computer? in 2003, Burks was also...

George Barnard Grant

One of the few Americans to make a significant contribution to mechanical computation prior to the end of the nineteenth century, Grant improved on the Difference Machine calculator and is recognized as...

Conrad (Conny) Palm

Contributor to teletraffic engineering and queueing theory, Palm also led the project that developed the first Swedish computer, the BARK. He enrolled at the School of Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute...

George W. Platzman

One of the founders of modern meteorology, Platzman helped formulate the first weather forecast by computer, carried out in 1950 on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). He pioneered the field...

Gustav Tauschek

Developer of numerous improvements for punched card-based calculating machines, Tauschek was an Austrian pioneer of information technology who worked in this field from 1922 to 1945. During the years 1926–1930 he worked...

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...

Lee de Forest

Inventor of the audion triode and audio and radio pioneer, De Forest had an interest in wireless telegraphy and invented the Audion in 1906. He then developed an improved wireless telegraph receiver....

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Named by IEEE as one of the fathers of radio science, Bose pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of...

Michael Woodger

Co-author of the ALGOL 60 report, a milestone in the history of programming languages, Woodger has been a British computer scientist and Emeritus Professor at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle University,...

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...

Arthur Scherbius

Inventor of the cryptographic machine Enigma, Scherbius founded the company to manufacture it and transformed the history of wartime communications. He was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied electricity at the...

Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope

Inventor of two calculating machines, Stanhope was also a British statesman and scientist and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). Also known as Charles Mahon, 3rd Earl Stanhope, he was the...