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Reaper
Cyrus McCormick, a blacksmith in Virginia, developed the first practical mechanical reaper to harvest grain in 1831 when he was only 22 years old. His machine, at first a local curiosity, proved to be enormously important. -
Steel Plow
John Deere invented the steel plow in 1837, in Grand Detour, Illinois when the Middle-West was first being settled. The soil was richer than that of the East and the farmer's wood plows kept breaking. -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. -
Phonograph
Thomas Edison created many inventions, but his favorite was the phonograph. While working on improvements to the telegraph and the telephone, Edison figured out a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders. In 1877, he created a machine with two needles: one for recording and one for playback. -
Edison's Lightbulb
By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison had built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. -
Alternating Current
After receiving a patent on the electric transmission of power in May of 1888, Tesla subsequently demonstrated alternating current electricity at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He then designed the first hydroelectric powerplant in Niagara Falls in 1895, culminating his lifelong dream -
Kodak Box Camera
By far the most significant event in the history of amateur photography was the introduction of the Kodak #1 camera in 1888. Invented and marketed by George Eastman (1854–1932), a former bank clerk from Rochester, New York, the Kodak was a simple box camera that came loaded with a 100-exposure roll of film. -
Motion Pictures
In 1888 in New York City, the great inventor Thomas Edison and his British assistant William Dickson worried that others were gaining ground in camera development. The pair set out to create a device that could record moving pictures. In 1890 Dickson unveiled the Kinetograph, a primitive motion picture camera.