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I. Scientific Revolution
1. Roger Bacon, O.F.M., was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed
considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods.
2. Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban, Kt., KC was an English philosopher, statesman,
scientist, jurist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of
England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely
influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the
scientific method during the scientific revolution.
3. Ren Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most
of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern
Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings,
which are studied closely to this day.
4. Andreas Vesalius was a Flemish anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most
influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the
Human Body).
5. Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch tradesman and scientist from Delft,
Netherlands. He is commonly known as "the Father of Microbiology", and considered to
be the first microbiologist.
6. Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the
foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature.
7. Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who
formulated a comprehensive heliocentric model which placed the Sun, rather than the
Earth, at the center of the universe.
8. Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include
improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support
for Copernicanism.
9. Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural
philosopher, alchemist and theologian who has been considered by many to be the
greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived. His monograph Philosophi
Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, laid the foundations for most of
classical mechanics.
10. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted
polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster,
scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.
11. Charles Robert Darwin, FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species
of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific
theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called
natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial
selection involved in selective breeding.
12. John Snow was an English physician and a leader in the adoption of anaesthesia and
medical hygiene. He is considered to be one of the fathers of modern epidemiology,
because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho, England, in
1854.
13. Edward Anthony Jenner, FRS was an English physician and scientist from Berkeley,
Gloucestershire, who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine. He is often called "the father
of immunology", and his work is said to have "saved more lives than the work of any
other man".
14. Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician,
meteorologist, and physicist who is best known for computing the orbit of the
eponymous Halley's Comet. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, following in
the footsteps of John Flamsteed.
15. Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key
figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws
of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova,
Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy.
II. Age of Enlightenment
1. John Locke FRS, widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English
philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment
thinkers.
2. Franois-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French
Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the
established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of
expression, and separation of church and state.

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3. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brde et de Montesquieu, generally referred to

as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived
during the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of
powers, which is taken for granted in modern discussions of government and
implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.
4. Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent
person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief
editor of and contributor to the Encyclopdie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert.
5. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was
an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651
book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from
the perspective of social contract theory.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18thcentury Romanticism of French expression. His political philosophy influenced the French
Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and
educational thought.
7. Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist,
philosopher, and music theorist. Until 1759 he was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of
the Encyclopdie.
8. James Madison, Jr. was an American statesman and political theorist, the fourth
President of the United States (18091817). He is hailed as the Father of the
Constitution for being instrumental in the drafting of the United States Constitution and
as the key champion and author of the United States Bill of Rights.
9. George Berkeley, also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish
philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called
"immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies
the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables
and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without
being perceived.
10. Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the
Historical and Critical Dictionary, published beginning in 1695. Bayle was a selfpronounced Protestant, and as a fideist he advocated a separation between the spheres
of faith and reason, on the grounds of God being incomprehensible to man.
III. First Industrial Revolution
1. John Kay was the inventor of the flying shuttle, which was a key contribution to the
Industrial Revolution.
2. James Hargreaves (17201778) was a weaver, carpenter and inventor in Lancashire,
England. He was one of three inventors responsible for mechanising spinning. James
Hargreaves is credited with inventing the spinning jenny in 1764, Richard Arkwright
patented the water frame in 1769, and Samuel Crompton combined the two creating the
spinning mule a little later.
3. Sir Richard Arkwright was an Englishman who, although the patents were eventually
overturned, is often credited with inventing the spinning frame, later renamed the water
frame following the transition to water power.
4. Edward (Edmund) Cartwright was an English clergyman and inventor of the power
loom.
5. Eli Whitney was an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This
was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of
the Antebellum South.
6. James Watt, FRS, FRSE was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose
improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes
brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the
world.
7. Sir Henry Bessemer was an English engineer, inventor, and businessman. Bessemer's
name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of
steel.
8. Thomas Newcomen was an English inventor who created the first practical steam
engine for pumping water, the Newcomen steam engine.
9. Abraham Darby I was the first, and most famous, of three generations with that name
in an English Quaker family that played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. He
developed a method of producing pig iron in a blast furnace fuelled by coke rather than
charcoal. This was a major step forward in the production of iron as a raw material for
the Industrial Revolution.
10. John Smeaton, FRS was an English civil engineer responsible for the design of
bridges, canals, harbours and lighthouses.

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11. Henry Cort was an English ironmaster. During the Industrial Revolution in England,
Cort began refining iron from pig iron to wrought iron (or bar iron) using innovative
production systems. In 1783 he patented the puddling process for refining iron ore.
12. Benjamin Huntsman was an English inventor and manufacturer of cast or crucible
steel.
13. Lewis Paul was the original inventor of roller spinning, the basis of the water frame
for spinning cotton in a cotton mill.
14. Sir Joseph Whitworth, 1st Baronet was an English engineer, entrepreneur, inventor
and philanthropist. In 1841, he devised the British Standard Whitworth system, which
created an accepted standard for screw threads.
15. Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA FGS was an English chemist and inventor.
He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline
earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of
chlorine and iodine. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture On Some Chemical
Agencies of Electricity" one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of
chemistry."
IV. Second Industrial Revolution
1. Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many
devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the
motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
2. Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most
important founders of medical microbiology. He was best known to the general public for
inventing a method to treat milk and wine in order to prevent it from causing sickness, a
process that came to be called pasteurization.
3. Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, Bt., OM, FRS, PC, known as Sir Joseph Lister, Bt.,
between 1883 and 1897, was a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery.
4. Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was a German physician. He became famous for
isolating Bacillus anthracis (1877), the Tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and Vibrio cholerae
(1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates.
5. John Loudon McAdam was a Scottish engineer and road-builder. He invented a new
process, "macadamisation", for building roads with a smooth hard surface that would be
more durable and less muddy than soil-based tracks.
6. Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with
developing the first commercially successful steamboat. In 1800, he was commissioned
by Napoleon Bonaparte to design the Nautilus, which was the first practical submarine in
history.
7. George Stephenson was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who built
the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, the Liverpool
and Manchester Railway which opened in 1830. Renowned as the "Father of Railways",
the Victorians considered him a great example of diligent application and thirst for
improvement, with self-help advocate Samuel Smiles particularly praising his
achievements.
8. Gottlieb Daimler was an engineer, industrial designer and industrialist born in
Schorndorf (Kingdom of Wrttemberg, a federal state of the German Confederation), in
what is now Germany.
9. Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, famous
for the invention of the Diesel engine.
10. Karl Friedrich Benz was a German engine designer and car engineer, generally
regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile, and together with Bertha
Benz pioneering founder of the automobile manufacturer Mercedes-Benz.
11. Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company,
and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.
Although Ford did not invent the automobile, he developed and manufactured the first
automobile that many middle class Americans could afford to buy.
12. Charles Goodyear was an American inventor who developed a process to vulcanize
rubber in 1839a method that he perfected while living and working in Springfield,
Massachusetts in 1844, and for which he received patent number 3633 from the United
States Patent Office on June 15, 1844.
13-14. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, were two American brothers, inventors,
and aviation pioneers who were credited with inventing and building the world's first
successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-thanair human flight, on December 17, 1903.
15. Charles Augustus Lindbergh, nicknamed Slim, Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle, was
an American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist.

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16. Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor. He contributed to the
invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs, was a coinventor of the Morse code, and also an accomplished painter.
17. 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.
18. Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator
who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.
19. Marchese Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long
distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio
telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the
1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their
contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
20. Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. was a United States aircraft industrialist and founder of the
Douglas Aircraft Company in 1921 (the company later merged into McDonnell Douglas
Corporation).
21. Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical
engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the
modern alternating current (AC) electrical supply system.
22. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who clarified and expanded James
Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light, which was first demonstrated by David
Edward Hughes using non-rigorous trial and error procedures.
23. George Westinghouse, Jr. was an American entrepreneur and engineer who invented
the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry. Westinghouse was one
of Thomas Edison's main rivals in the early implementation of the American electricity
system.
24. Sir Joseph Wilson Swan was a British physicist and chemist. He is most famous for
inventing an incandescent light bulb before its independent invention by the American
Thomas Edison.
25. Herman Hollerith was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator
based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He
was the founder of one of the companies that later merged and became IBM.