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Steam engine
James Watt was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1781 -
Fuel Cell
The fuel cell, a device that produces electrical energy by combining hydrogen and oxygen, was invented by Sir William Robert Grove in 1839. -
solar panel
Solar panels were invented 55 years ago by scientists Gerald Pearson, Calvin Fuller and Daryl Chapin. -
lightbulb
In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan created a light bulb by enclosing carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. -
Wind turbine
Charles F. Brush was the first person to use wind to power energy sources in the winter of 1887. He used the wind turbine around his home to power cellular batteries that were in the basement of his mansion. -
Geothermal power plant
In 1904, Italian scientist Piero Ginori Conti invented the first geothermal electric power plant in which steam was used to generate the power. -
Electric battery
A Swedish scientist named Waldemar Jungner invented the nickel–cadmium battery, a rechargeable battery that had nickel and cadmium electrodes in a potassium hydroxide solution; the first battery to use an alkaline electrolyte. It was commercialized in Sweden in 1910 and reached the United States in 1946. -
nuclear power
Enrico Fermi was considered to have invented nuclear power, along with his colleagues at the University of Chicago in 1942, by successfully demonstrating the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. -
Wave power
It was Stephen Salter's 1974 invention that converted waves into an efficient power source. His invention became known as Salter's duck or nodding duck. -
greenhouses
The French botanist Charles Lucien Bonaparte is often credited with building the first practical modern greenhouse in Leiden, Holland, during the 1800s to grow medicinal tropical plants.
