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Unknown but incredibly important inventors
Shane Greenstein asks me for examples of:
...unknown inventors whose work greatly benefited society and who deserve more recognition. Ask for nominations!
...And I will start with nominating Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, the inventors of the microchip. I do not know a school boy who has ever heard of them, but everyone uses their invention.
Comments are, of course, open. How about Fred Soper?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 26, 2006 at 07:28 AM in Data Source | Permalink
Comments
Tim Berners-Lee. I doubt 1% of the people who use the web know about him.
Posted by: Cisco at Sep 26, 2006 8:24:49 AM
How about Abraham Van Heel?
Posted by: Cris at Sep 26, 2006 8:40:37 AM
Upon further thought, how about Samuel Bailey, Mountifort Longfield, or Fleeming Jenkin?
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Sep 26, 2006 8:46:27 AM
Could someone please clarify what inventors we believe schoolchildren do
know? I'm thinking Edison, maybe Salk, but who else? Eli Whitney?
I'm just thinking that more inventors are unknown than we even think.
Posted by: hamilton at Sep 26, 2006 9:43:15 AM
Nicola Tesla, father of AC current, the flourescent light bulb, and radio.
And for the really obscure, Samuel Insull. He invented the business model that let to widespread, cheap electric power. Without him, most of us might be still using gas to light our homes and businesses.
Posted by: SteveSC at Sep 26, 2006 9:59:51 AM
Philo Farnsworth.
Posted by: El Greco at Sep 26, 2006 10:09:26 AM
As Hamilton says, the schoolchildren criterion seems absurd, since it's unlikely that schoolchildren have heard of Cyrus McCormick or Eli Whitney, or perhaps even Samuel Morse. But no reasonable person could say they're unknown. Similarly, to say that Robert Noyce, who was profiled decades by Tom Wolfe, who is one of Silicon Valley's most venerated figures, and who started one of the most important companies in American business history, is "unknown" stretches the definition into meaninglessness. I'd say the same about Tesla and Tim Berners-Lee, too.
Posted by: William Goodwin at Sep 26, 2006 10:13:08 AM
BTW, PBS has a very interesting timeline of key innovators based on the book by Harold Evans, They Made America. The book is a series of short vignettes and is fascinating and highly readable.
Posted by: SteveSC at Sep 26, 2006 10:17:53 AM
Norman Borlaug developed hybrid dwarf grains, the basis of a world where food is abundant.
Nicola Tesla has recently developed a cult following, but probably still counts
Florence Nightengale is a strange case. People think of her as a saintly nurse but don't recognize her importance to the devlopment of scientific, statistically based medicine.
Posted by: michael vassar at Sep 26, 2006 10:18:09 AM
And another pet peeve of mine is that San Jose airport was recently renamed after Norman Mineta, a non-descript congressman who will soon be forgotten, rather than Noyce, or Kilbee or Moore or someone who laid the groundwork on which silicon valley is built
Posted by: paul at Sep 26, 2006 10:22:20 AM
So Mr. Goodwin, who qualifies under YOUR definition of unknown? It is easy to nitpick, but what is unknown anyway? Not taught in schools (admittedly way to inclusive IMHO)? Never been mentioned in a textbook? Not in Wikipedia? Not mentioned in a Google search?
I had never heard of the three Tyler mentioned in these comments, yet all were easily found by Google and two were in Wikipedia. It is hard to be 'unknown' in today's communication age. I would say that, given a general sample of people, an inventor three standard deviations out, i.e., known to less than 2% of the sample, is unknown, and four standard deviations is really obscure.
Posted by: SteveSC at Sep 26, 2006 10:29:42 AM
Could everyone please include the invention with the name of the inventor; I do need to get some work done today.
Posted by: josh at Sep 26, 2006 10:46:47 AM
How about Kary Mullis, who invented PCR. But maybe I only think he's unknown because that's not my field. I can't imagine anyone calling Noyce and Kilby unknown, but that's probably only because I'm an EE.
Posted by: dan at Sep 26, 2006 11:50:49 AM
Do concepts, like calculus or musical notation, count as inventions?
Posted by: pedant at Sep 26, 2006 11:52:51 AM
I was definitely taught about Samuel Morse and Eli Whitney as a child. Who doesn't learn about Morse Code and SOS?
Whitney is a really big deal in most junior high US history courses; he is usually blamed for the South's cotton-slavery economy and sometimes credited with Yankee manufactyring strength.
Posted by: DK at Sep 26, 2006 11:54:29 AM
Didn't Noyce and Kilby share the Nobel prize in physics? Granted very unknown during their lives, but hard to call Nobel laureates unknown.
Posted by: nelsonal at Sep 26, 2006 12:23:32 PM
DK,
Exactly! This is my memory of events.
And yet none of the students in my 202 (intro macro) course
remembered ol' Eli when I brought him up. So I called some family friends
with high schoolers; they had no memory, either.
[I was scared to ask about Mr Morse. It would have hurt my soul.]
hamilton
Posted by: hamilton at Sep 26, 2006 12:40:56 PM
Among modern inventors two thoughts: Carl Djerassi and John Logie Baird.
If you want to go further back, Edge.org did an excellent survey in 1999 on the most important invention of the last 2,000 years. Freeman Dyson argues persuasively for hay: http://www.edge.org/documents/Invention.html
On Tesla, last night's "Studio 60 on Sunset Strip" had a passing line on the main characters having been involved in a project to make a film about Tesla.
Posted by: Lance Knobel at Sep 26, 2006 12:51:43 PM
Well, I have a problem with the original post. What's a microchip? Honestly, don't you mean that they invented the Integrated Circuit? Well, if I were a school child, I would not call the IC "a microchip", because that's now too vague. Only Kilby received a nobel prize, as the prize is not given posthumuously, and Noyce had already died by 2000. Brittain, Bardeen and Shockley invented the transistor, which also won a nobel prize.
btw, am I the only person who can't see the right hand side of the comments screen, as it is hidden by the ads?
Posted by: anonymous at Sep 26, 2006 1:06:21 PM
I agree that if you have Noyce & Kilby, you need to have Brittain, Bardeen, & Shockley. Without transistors, there is nothing to integrate!
Other famous inventors, Bell? Others to add, Claude Shannon? John Atanasoff - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Atanasoff?
Posted by: Jim Caserta at Sep 26, 2006 1:15:01 PM
In the world of IT and computers, I would recommend nominating Claude Shannon. Shannon's theories and ideas form the basis for all modern digital computers. Yes Virginia, there once upon a time were analog ones too!
For food and eating, I could suggest Clarence Birdseye, though Birdseye at least left a legacy of having a fairly well known company being named after him.
How about Frank Whittle in aviation? Whittle might be better known in Britain and his own field than in the public imagination.
Posted by: Neal Meyer at Sep 26, 2006 1:22:55 PM
American physicians chose MRI as the most significant medical innovation of the past 50 years. But not everyone agrees on who invented it. A Nobel prize for its development was shared by UK’s Peter Mansfield and US’s Paul Lauterbur. But MIT awarded American Raymond Damadian a Lifetime Achievement award as "the man who invented the MRI scanner"
Posted by: JohnDewey at Sep 26, 2006 1:23:53 PM
Antonio Meucci The telephone
Posted by: S at Sep 26, 2006 2:06:51 PM
I'll second the motion for Norman Borlaug, although he'd be the first to admit he had help with the Green Revolution.
He's definitely my hero.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Sep 26, 2006 2:09:00 PM
"btw, am I the only person who can't see the right hand side of the comments screen"
If you mean "once you start typing," no, you're not.
Posted by: Anderson at Sep 26, 2006 4:09:13 PM
