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Charles Townshend
Other than his political career, Charles Townshend is most famous for inventing the "Four Field System" of crop rotation. He divided his field into four sections, in which he planted wheat, barley, turnips, and clover, in that order. Each year, the order of the crops would be rotated clockwise. -
James Hargreaves
James Hargreaves was an English weaver, carpenter and inventor who lived and worked in Lancashire, England. Hargreaves is credited with inventing the spinning jenny in 1764. -
Richard Arkwright
Arkwright is best known for his invention of the spinning frame, or water frame, which he patented in 1769, and which produced thread from carded cotton automatically, by machine. It was an improvement over the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves because the thread was stronger. -
James Watt
Although Watt invented and improved several industrial technologies, he is best remembered for his improvements to the steam engine. Watt's steam engine design incorporated two of his inventions: the separate condenser (1765) and the parallel motion (1784). -
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney Jr. was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South. -
Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian physicist and chemist who was a pioneer of electricity and power and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. -
Joseph Marie Jacquard
The Jacquard mechanism simplified how complex textiles such as damask were woven. The mechanism involved the use of thousands of punch cards laced together. Each row of punched holes corresponded to a row of a textile pattern. -
George Stephenson
George Stephenson was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer during the Industrial Revolution. Renowned as the "Father of Railways", Stephenson was considered by the Victorians as a great example of diligent application and thirst for improvement. -
Samuel Morse
Samuel Morse was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle years Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. -
Louis Daguerre
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. -
Henry Bessemer
Sir Henry Bessemer was an English inventor, whose steel-making process would become the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one hundred years. He also played a significant role in establishing the town of Sheffield, nicknamed ‘Steel City’, as a major industrial center. -
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor, scientist, and engineer credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. -
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. The invention he was most known for was the lightbulb. -
Gottlieb Daimler
Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler was a German engineer, industrial designer, and industrialist born in Schorndorf, in what is now Germany. He was a pioneer of internal combustion engines and automobile development. He invented the high-speed liquid petroleum-fueled engine. -
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system.