1946 to 1975

Rutgers graduate student Schatz discovered streptomycin in soil bacteria screening run by Waksman, who patented it and licensed ro...

Bell Labs' December 1947 point-contact demonstration led to Shockley's junction transistor theory and patent 2,524,035 in 1950. AT...

Hetrick, a retired industrial engineer, patented the inflatable vehicle cushion after a brush with a roadside obstacle with his da...

Bell Labs' 1954 silicon photovoltaic cell, patented 1957, converted about 6 percent of sunlight, first powering rural telephone re...

De Mestral, walking his dog through Alpine burrs in 1941, wondered why they clung, then spent a decade replicating hooks and loops...

Fermi's team achieved the first controlled chain reaction in December 1942 under Stagg Field, wartime secrecy burying the news. Th...

Coover rejected cyanoacrylates in 1942 as ruined gun-sight plastics, then recognized their instant bonding in 1951 heat-resistant ...

Djerassi's Mexico City Syntex team synthesized norethisterone from yams in 1951, patents following through 1956 as Searle and Pinc...

Volvo's chief engineer Bohlin designed the three-point belt so a torso and pelvis share the load, filing in 1959. Volvo made the d...

Kilby built germanium circuits at TI in 1958; Noyce's Fairchild planar process made silicon manufacturable and interconnected. The...

Greatbatch grabbed the wrong resistor in 1956 and watched his oscillator tick at heartbeat pace. His mercury-powered implant, pate...

Penn's ENIAC computed artillery tables with 18,000 vacuum tubes from 1945. Eckert and Mauchly left to build UNIVAC, winning their ...

General Electric's Holonyak made gallium arsenide phosphide glow red in 1962, predicting lamps that would replace Edison's filamen...

Dennard's one-transistor, one-capacitor cell, patented 1968, shrank memory a thousandfold per dollar per decade. DRAM scaling rode...

Engelbart's SRI team built the wooden-wheel mouse for the 1968 Mother of All Demos, patenting an X-Y position indicator for a disp...

EMI's Hounsfield, funded partly by Beatles record profits, patented computed tomography from 1968 and scanned a patient's head in ...

Intel's 4004, built for a Japanese calculator in 1971, crammed 2,300 transistors of CPU onto one die, patented 1974 as a memory sy...

Silver's 1968 microsphere acrylate was too weak for anything, a glue that would not stay stuck. Fry, a choir bookmark sufferer, fo...

Kwolek's 1965 liquid-crystal spinning solution looked cloudy and wrong, but she insisted on spinning it, yielding para-aramid fibe...

Bell Labs' 1969 semiconductor shift-register invention, patented 1974, moved charge packets as memory then, quickly, as light sens...

Damadian's 1971 tumor-detection finding and 1974 patent on scanning apparatus, field-focused by his Fonar company, launched magnet...

Cambridge's Kohler and Milstein fused myeloma cells with B-cells, making immortal antibody factories of single specificity. The 19...

Motorola's Cooper made the first handheld cellular call in April 1973, phoning his rival at Bell Labs. Patent 3,906,166, radio tel...

Woodland, a graduate student, sketched the idea by drawing Morse code dots and dashes in the sand of Miami Beach and stretching th...

Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer noticed a candy bar melting in his pocket while working near an active magnetron, the radar tube b...

Schawlow and Townes extended the maser principle to light and received their patent for optical masers in 1960, the same year Theo...

Lego's early plastic bricks, adapted from a British design, did not hold together well. In January 1958 Godtfred Kirk Christiansen...

Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was tested on well over a million American children in 1954, one of the largest medical tri...

Engineer Christopher Cockerell tested his idea by blowing air from a vacuum cleaner motor into one tin can set inside another and ...

Budapest architecture professor Erno Rubik built his first cube in 1974 to show students how parts could move independently withou...