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John Roebuck
John Roebuck of Kinneil FRS FRSE was an English inventor and industrialist who played an important role in the Industrial Revolution and who is known for developing the industrial-scale manufacture of sulphuric acid. -
John Hargreaves
James Hargreaves was an English weaver, carpenter and inventor who lived and worked in Lancashire, England. Known for his invention of the spinning jenny. James Hargreaves' spinning jenny was said to have been designed after he saw his wife's spinning wheel knocked over and saw the spindle continue to spin. The spinning jenny used eight different spindles that were powered by a single wheel. -
Richard Arkwright
Sir Richard Arkwright was an English inventor and a leading entrepreneur during the early Industrial Revolution. He is known for his invention of the Spinning Frame and Water Frame, but more notably the Water Frame. -
James Watt
James Watt FRS FRSE was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. -
Nicolas LeBlanc
Nicolas Leblanc was a French chemist and surgeon who discovered how to manufacture soda ash from common salt. Over half of all soda ash production is used for glass making, but it is also used in a wide range of other products, such as powdered detergents and soaps and rechargeable batteries, as well as being used extensively in metallurgical processes, and across the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. -
Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist, chemist and lay Catholic who was a pioneer of electricity and power who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. -
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the North River Steamboat. -
David Ricardo
Ricardo's widely acclaimed comparative advantage theory suggests that nations can gain an international trade advantage when they focus on producing goods that produce the lowest opportunity costs as compared to other nations. Comparative advantage, Ricardo believed, ensured that international trade would bring benefits for all countries; his theory remains the foundation of the economic case for free trade today. -
Robert Owen
Owen is widely credited with being the first person to advocate for a universal “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest” approach to work-life balance. -
Elias Howe
Elias Howe Jr. was an American inventor best known for his creation of the modern lockstitch sewing machine. -
Karl Marx
The Father of Communism, Karl Marx, a German philosopher and economist, proposed this new ideology in his Communist Manifesto, which he wrote with Friedrich Engels in 1848. The manifesto emphasized the importance of class struggle in every historical society, and the dangerous instability capitalism created. -
Cyrus Field
Cyrus West Field was an American businessman and financier who, along with other entrepreneurs, created the Atlantic Telegraph Company and laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.