PatentDB
106 famous patents and inventions that built the modern world: the inventors, the patent years, and the stories behind the telephone, the airplane, the transistor, and WiFi. Browse by field of technology or by era.
Landmark Patents
Telephone
Bell's patent application arrived February 14, 1876, hours before Elisha Gray's caveat for the same idea. The famous Mr Watson, co...
Incandescent Light Bulb
Edison's 1879 high-resistance carbon filament made electric lighting commercially real, patented in 1880 after months of material ...
Airplane
The Wrights patented three-axis control, not lift, filing in 1903 and granted 821,393 in 1906. Glenn Curtiss's ailerons infringed ...
Transistor
Bell Labs' December 1947 point-contact demonstration led to Shockley's junction transistor theory and patent 2,524,035 in 1950. AT...
Integrated Circuit
Kilby built germanium circuits at TI in 1958; Noyce's Fairchild planar process made silicon manufacturable and interconnected. The...
Cellular Phone
Motorola's Cooper made the first handheld cellular call in April 1973, phoning his rival at Bell Labs. Patent 3,906,166, radio tel...
WiFi
Australia's science agency CSIRO patented OFDM-based wireless LAN methods in 1996, solving indoor multipath echoes that defeated o...
Lithium-Ion Battery
Goodenough's 1980 cobalt-oxide cathode at Oxford, unpatented by the university, met Yoshino's carbon anode at Asahi Kasei, patente...
CRISPR Gene Editing
Doudna and Charpentier's 2012 Science paper on Cas9 programming met Zhang's Broad Institute eukaryotic-editing filings, granted sp...