Allessandro Volta

Inventor of the battery in 1800 and a remotely operated pistol that was a significant forerunner of the telegraph, Volta transformed the understanding of electricity. He was born in Como, Italy, and taught...

Giovanni Poleni

Builder of the first pinwheel design calculating clock, Poleni was a pioneer of mechanical computation. Made of wood, his calculating clock was built in 1709; he destroyed it after hearing that Antonius...

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...

Alexander Bain

Inventor of the electric clock and pioneer of the telegraph, Bain transformed early communications technology. His first patent was dated January 11, 1841, and was in the names of John Barwise, chronometer...

Marian Adam Rejewski

Solver of the plugboard-equipped Enigma machine, the main cipher device used by Germany, Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who accomplished this feat in 1932. His success, along with his colleagues...

Charles Proteus Steinmetz

Fostering the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, Steinmetz was a mathematician and electrical engineer who formulated mathematical theories for...

Hewitt D. Crane

Developer of an eye-movement tracking device and pen-input device for computers, Crane was an American engineer best known for his pioneering work at SRI International on ERMA (Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting), for...

Morton M. Astrahan

Developer of the SAGE air-defense computer and a pioneer in relational database systems, Astrahan joined IBM in 1949 and spent his entire professional career there—first at the Endicott Laboratory and then later...

Joseph (J. J.) John Thomson

Discoverer of the electron and isotopes, and inventor of the mass spectrometer, Thomson was a British physicist and Nobel laureate born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. His early education took place in...

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...

Charles Sanders Peirce

As early as 1886, Peirce saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, the same idea that was used decades later to produce digital computers. An American philosopher,...

Henry (Hank) Wallman

Co-builder of the Electronic Differential Analyser, an early example of an analog computer, Wallman also performed pioneering research in biomedical engineering combining video displays with X-ray imaging. An American mathematician known for...

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...

Harry Wexler

A pioneer in the use of computers for weather prediction and modification, Wexler was an American meteorologist who attended Harvard University, and in 1939 was awarded a Ph.D. in meteorology from the...

Nikola Tesla

A major contributor to the birth of commercial electricity and revolutionary developer in the field of electromagnetism, Tesla was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer who is best known for his...

Albert Einstein

1921 Nobel Prize winner in Physics for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution...

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,...

Guglielmo Marconi

Known as the father of long distance radio transmission, Marconi was an Italian inventor celebrated for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Although he is often accredited as...

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...

Lewis Fry Richardson

Pioneer of fractals and the modified Richardson iteration method for solving systems of linear equations, Richardson was also an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of...