1900 to 1945

Anderson, an Alabama developer, watched trolley drivers open windows in New York sleet and patented a spring-loaded rubber blade o...

Gillette, a bottle-cap salesman, imagined a blade so cheap it could be thrown away, and with MIT-trained William Nickerson achieve...

The Wrights patented three-axis control, not lift, filing in 1903 and granted 821,393 in 1906. Glenn Curtiss's ailerons infringed ...

Carrier's Apparatus for Treating Air, patented 1906, was born from a Brooklyn printer's humidity problem. His rational psychrometr...

Holt patented the continuous-tread tractor after photographing one of his wheels sinking in San Joaquin delta peat. The Caterpilla...

Haber patented ammonia synthesis in 1908; Bosch's BASF team scaled monstrous high-pressure reactors by 1913. Nitrogen fertilizer f...

Belgian-American chemist Baekeland patented phenol-formaldehyde resin, the first plastic not derived from plants or animals. Bakel...

Coolidge's General Electric tube, patents from 1913, used hot tungsten cathodes for steady, controllable X-ray output. Earlier gas...

Sundback, a Swedish-American engineer, solved earlier hook-and-eye failures with the dimpled scooped teeth of the Hookless 2, pate...

Goddard patented multi-stage and liquid-fuel rocketry in 1914, two years before his solid-work Smithsonian report. His 1926 Auburn...

Morgan, a Black Cleveland inventor of the gas mask Hood fame, patented a three-position traffic signal with a warning stance betwe...

Toronto's team isolated insulin in 1921 and patented it in 1923 for one dollar each, licensing royalty-free to universities and El...

Farnsworth conceived raster scanning at 14 plowing Idaho potato rows, then built the all-electronic image dissector by 1927. Paten...

RAF officer Whittle patented the turbojet in 1930, granted 1932, too poor to renew the critical years. Ohain in Germany flew indep...

Hungarian journalist Biro, escaping Europe, patented the ball-and-quick-dry-ink pen in Paris 1938 and Argentina 1940 after pilots ...

Carothers' polyamide research at DuPont yielded nylon 6,6, patented 1938 after his death by suicide in 1937. Stockings introduced ...

Sikorsky, already famous for giant flying boats, patented and flew the VS-300 in 1939 with one main rotor and one tail rotor, the ...

Plunkett opened a tetrafluoroethylene cylinder in 1938 to find it empty, the gas having polymerized into white wax. PTFE was inert...

Carlson, broke in a Depression-era patent office, worked kitchen-lab electrostatics for years, patenting xerography in 1942. Twent...

Charles Darrow sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers in 1935 and received a patent at the end of that year, presenting himself as its i...