2. Nicola Tesla
Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. n a revelation that Tesla said "came in a flash" during a walk in the park in 1881, he conceived of using an alternating current to produce a rotating magnetic field that could drive a motor. While working or the Continental Edison Company in Paris, he built the first induction motor. Tesla then came to the United States in 1884 with little money and a letter of introduction to Thomas Alva Edison. While Edison gave Tesla a job as a research assistant in his industrial-research laboratory, he did not work for Edison for very long.

Edison disagreed violently with Tesla about the potential for alternating current and the men were very far apart in manner and temperment. Edison, very much the methodical plodder, was an entirely practical man while Tesla was driven by his periodic flashes of brilliant insight into theoretical leaps of faith. Edison considered alternating current unsafe because of the high voltages it produced and preferred the direct-current system.

Tesla then established a laboratory where he created many inventions including a teleautomatic boat, a system of arc lighting that didn't require wire, and the invention that bears his name: "the Tesla Coil." The Tesla coil is a high-frequency induction coil that is still used for long-distance radio and television transmission. With age, Tesla became more eccentric and controversial and proposed many highly ambitious and controversial projects such as a world-wide communications system and a death ray. All of his later projects failed due to experimental failures and a lack of funding. Still, he was a favorite of newspaper reporters because of his flamboyant demonstrations and controversial predictions.

3. Thomas Alva Edison
During the eighty-four years of his life, Edison patented 1,093 inventions. On December 31, 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrated his most famous invention: the first practical incandescent electric lamp. He was not, however, the first inventor to experiment with electric light. When
Edison began testing possibilities for incandescent lamps, the arc light was already becoming popular for lighting streets, department stores, and other large areas.
Inventions
Electrographic Vote Recorder 1868
Printing Telegraph 1869
Electromotor Escapement 1870
Telegraph Transmitting Instrument 1870
Electric Motor Governors 1870
Telegraphic Recording Instrument 1871
Machinery for perforating paper 1871
Typewriting Machine 1871
Electrical Printing Machine 1872
Automatic Telegraph Instruments 1872
Galvanic Batteries 1872
Telegraph Signal Boxes 1872
Duplex Telegraphs1873
Quadruplex Telegraph Repeater 1875
Autographic Printing 1876
Telephonic Telegraphs 1876
Acoustic Telegraphs 1876
Electro Harmonic Multiplex Telegraph 1876
Perforating Pens 1877
Speaking Telegraph 1877
Sextuplex Telegraph 1877
Addressing Machine 1877 Telephone1877
Phonograph or Speaking Machine1877
Carbon Telephones 1878
Vocal Engines1878
Thermal Regulator for Electric Lights1878
Electric Lighting Apparatus 1878
Typewriter 1878
Autographic Stencils for Printing 1879
Dynamo Electric Machines 1879
Safety Conductor for Electric Lights 1880
Brake for Electro Magnetic Motors 1880
Magnetic Ore Separator 1880
Webermeter1880
Process for Preserving Fruit1880
Electric Meter1881
Electric Motor1881
Current regulator for Dynamo Electric Machine 1881
Underground Conductors 1882
Telephone Repeater1884
Fuse Block 1885
Pyromagnetic Motor 1887
Pyromagnetic Generator 1887
Thermo Electric Battery 1888
Phonograph Recorder 1888
Phonograph reproducer 1888
Phonograph Doll 1889
A.C. Generator1891
Lightning Arrester 1891
Kinetograph and Projecting Kinetoscope 1897
Electric Meter 1898
Sound Recording Apparatus 1901
Photographic Film for Moving Picture Machine 1903

4. Lev Sergeivitch Termen (anglicized to Leon Theremin)
Leon was a physicist, and in 1919 while working for the Russian government on alarm devices, he invented the theremin. The device he created caused a whistle which changed in a predictable way with the proximity of an approaching body, and he found that he could play recognizable melodies by varying the distance of his hand by discrete amounts in front of the alarm. The first prototype of the theremin was made in 1919 just as the civil war in Russia broke out. Theremin was granted a US patent on February 28, 1928 for the "thereminvox", as it was then called, and it was commercially licensed by RCA in the same year. It is unique in that it is the first musical instrument that can be played without being touched. It has been used in settings as widely varying as the movie soundtracks, rock bands, television music and as a serious solo instrument played by the virtuoso Clara Rockmore, another Russian.

5. Hedy Lamarr
On June 10, 1941, Lamarr and composer George Antheil received Patent No. 2,292,387 for their invention of a classified communication system that was especially useful for submarines. The system was a stroke of genius. It was based on radio frequencies changed at irregular periods that were synchronized between the transmitter and receiver. Though most people would take pride in such an achievement, Lamarr, unfortunately, denies any involvement in the invention.

6. Isaac Newton
He recorded his thoughts in a book which he entitled Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae (Certain Philosophical Questions). It is a fascinating account of how Newton's ideas were already forming around 1664. In a period of less than two years, while Newton was still under 25 years old, he began revolutionary advances in mathematics, optics, physics, and astronomy. Newton's first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics and this was the topic of his first lecture course begun in January 1670. He had reached the conclusion during the two plague years that white light is not a simple entity. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed that white light was a basic single entity, but the chromatic aberration in a telescope lens convinced Newton otherwise. When he passed a thin beam of sunlight through a glass prism Newton noted the spectrum of colours that was formed. He argued that white light is really a mixture of many different types of rays which are refracted at slightly different angles, and that each different type of ray produces a different spectral colour. Newton was led by this reasoning to the erroneous conclusion that telescopes using refracting lenses would always suffer chromatic aberration. He therefore proposed and constructed a reflecting telescope. Newton's greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation. By 1666 Newton had early versions of his three laws of motion. He had also discovered the law giving the centrifugal force on a body moving uniformly in a circular path. Newton published the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica or Principia as it is always known.

7. Albert Einstein
In the first of three papers, all written in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities. The energy of these quanta was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This seemed to contradict classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell's equations and the laws of thermodynamics which assumed that electromagnetic energy consisted of waves which could contain any small amount of energy. Einstein used Planck's quantum hypothesis to describe the electromagnetic radiation of light.

Einstein's second 1905 paper proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. He based his new theory on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, namely that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, as required by Maxwell's theory.

Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein was not the first to propose all the components of special theory of relativity. His contribution is unifying important parts of classical mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics.

The third of Einstein's papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics, a field of that had been studied by Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs.

After 1905 Einstein continued working in the areas described above. He made important contributions to quantum theory, but he sought to extend the special theory of relativity to phenomena involving acceleration. The key appeared in 1907 with the principle of equivalence, in which gravitational acceleration was held to be indistinguishable from acceleration caused by mechanical forces. Gravitational mass was therefore identical with inertial mass.

In 1908 Einstein became a lecturer at the University of Bern after submitting his Habilitation thesis Consequences for the constitution of radiation following from the energy distribution law of black bodies. The following year he become professor of physics at the University of Zurich, having resigned his lectureship at Bern and his job in the patent office in Bern.

By 1909 Einstein was recognised as a leading scientific thinker and in that year he resigned from the patent office. He was appointed a full professor at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1911. In fact 1911 was a very significant year for Einstein since he was able to make preliminary predictions about how a ray of light from a distant star, passing near the Sun, would appear to be bent slightly, in the direction of the Sun. This would be highly significant as it would lead to the first experimental evidence in favour of Einstein's theory.

About 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research, with the help of his mathematician friend Marcel Grossmann, by expressing his work in terms of the tensor calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro. Einstein called his new work the general theory of relativity. He moved from Prague to Zurich in 1912 to take up a chair at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 but not for relativity rather for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. In fact he was not present in December 1922 to receive the prize being on a voyage to Japan. Around this time he made many international visits. He had visited Paris earlier in 1922 and during 1923 he visited Palestine. After making his last major scientific discovery on the association of waves with matter in 1924 he made further visits in 1925, this time to South America.

One week before his death Einstein signed his last letter. It was a letter to Bertrand Russell in which he agreed that his name should go on a manifesto urging all nations to give up nuclear weapons. It is fitting that one of his last acts was to argue, as he had done all his life, for international peace.

8. Marie Curie
Marie Curie, née Sklodowska

She was appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914. Curies in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Marie's birth, and radium. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic properties in particular. Curie throughout her life actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering and during World War I, assisted by her daughter, Irene, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work. She retained her enthusiasm for science throughout her life and did much to establish a radioactivity laboratory in her native city - in 1929 President Hoover of the United States presented her with a gift of $ 50,000, donated by American friends of science, to purchase radium for use in the laboratory in Warsaw. Curie, quiet, dignified and unassuming, was held in high esteem and admiration by scientists throughout the world. She was a member of the Conseil du Physique Solvay from 1911 until her death and since 1922 she had been a member of the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Her work is recorded in numerous papers in scientific journals and she is the author of Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives (1904), L'Isotopie et les Éléments Isotopes and the classic Traité' de Radioactivité ( 1910). Curie's work is reflected in the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. She also received, jointly with her husband, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1903 and, in 1921, President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her service to science.

9. Charles Babbage, Ghost of
Charles Babbage is often referred as the "father of computing" because of his invention of the analytical engine, a prototype of which was completed far after his death. As a youth Babbage was his own instructor in algebra, of which he was passionately fond, and was well-read in the continental mathematics of his day. Upon entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1811, he found himself far in advance of his tutors in mathematics. With Herschel, Peacock, and others, Babbage founded the Analytical Society for promoting continental mathematics and, reforming the mathematics of Newton then taught at the university. In his twenties Babbage worked as a mathematician, principally in the calculus of functions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1816, and played a prominent part in the foundation of the Astronomical Society (later Royal Astronomical Society) in 1820. It was about this time that Babbage first acquired the interest in calculating machinery that became his consuming passion for the remainder of his life.

Throughout his life Babbage worked in many intellectual fields typical of his day, and made contributions that would have assured his fame irrespective of the Difference and Analytical Engines. Prominent among his published works are A Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives (1826), Table of Logarithms of the Natural Numbers from 1 to 108, 000 (1827), Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), and the autobiographical Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864). Babbage occupied the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. He played an important role in the establishment of the Association for the Advancement of Science and the Statistical Society (later Royal Statistical Society). Despite his many achievements, the failure to construct his calculating machines, and in particular the failure of the government to support his work, left Babbage in his declining years a disappointed and embittered man. He died at his home in Dorset Street, London, on October 18, 1871.

10. Grace Hopper
The late Commodore Grace Hopper's spectacular scientific achievements have become international. She had changed the ever-growing world of the computer. She brought her mathematical abilities to the nation when, in 1943, she entered the U.S. Naval Reserve commissioned as lieutenant. As a senior mathematician with Sperry Rand, she worked on the first commercial computer. As Director of Automatic Programming, she published the first paper on compilers in 1952. Since that time she has published over fifty papers on software and on programming languages. While on active duty with the Naval Data Automation Command, this remarkable woman traveled throughout the world speaking to thousands about the future of computers.

11. Alan Mathison Turing
Alan Turing appears now as the Founder of Computer Science, the originator of the dominant technology of the late twentieth century, but these words were not spoken in his own lifetime, and
he may yet be seen in a different light in the future. They are also words very remote from the circumstances of his birth and infancy.

Subsequently, the concept of the Turing machine has become the foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability. His work introduced a concept of immense practical significance: the idea of the Universal Turing Machine. The concept of 'the Turing machine' is like that of 'the formula' or 'the equation'; there is an infinity of possible Turing machines, each corresponding to a different 'definite method' or algorithm. But imagine, as Turing did, each particular algorithm written out as a set of instructions in a standard form. Then the work of interpreting the instructions and carrying them out is itself a mechanical process, and so can itself be embodied in a particular Turing machine, namely the Universal Turing machine. A Universal Turing machine can be made do what any other particular Turing machine would do, by supplying it with the standard form describing that Turing machine. One machine, for all possible tasks. It is hard now not to think of a Turing machine as a computer program, and the mechanical task of interpreting and obeying the program as what the computer itself does. Thus, the Universal Turing Machine embodies the essential principle of the computer: a single machine which can be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with the appropriate program. Additionally, the abstract Universal Turing Machine naturally exploits what was later seen as the 'stored program' concept essential to the modern computer: it embodies the crucial twentieth-century insight that symbols representing instructions are no different in kind from symbols representing numbers. But computers, in this modern sense, did not exist in 1936. Turing created these concepts out of his mathematical imagination. Only nine years later would electronic technology be tried and tested sufficiently to make it practical to transfer the logic of his ideas into actual engineering. In the meanwhile the idea lived only in his mind. True to the concreteness of the Turing machine, he also spent time at Princeton making a cipher machine based on using electromagnetic relays to multiplying binary numbers. Even then he saw a link from 'useless' logic to practical computation. Although not one of the political intellectuals of the 1930s, Turing followed current events and was influenced in studying ciphers by the prospect of war with Germany.

All Research Completed by Trae Cooper, 2000
Sources: Many, available upon request.