field list
A course in Engineering
The people who built engineering as we practise it, in the order they arrived.
Imhotep
2650 BCE – 2600 BCEArchitect of the first pyramid and the earliest named physician in history.
Cai Lun
50 – 121Standardised papermaking, the substrate of recorded civilisation.
Zhang Heng
78 – 139Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.
Su Song
1020 – 1101Built an astronomical clock tower with the first known escapement chain drive.
Shen Kuo
1031 – 1095Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.
Sejong the Great
1397 – 1450Commissioned Hangul, the alphabet that made Korea literate.
Johannes Gutenberg
1400 – 1468Industrialised the word and detonated the modern world.
Leonardo da Vinci
1452 – 1519Proved that art and science are one act of looking.
Mimar Sinan
1489 – 1588Built over 300 structures including the Selimiye Mosque; Ottoman master architect.
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Nikolaus Otto
1832 – 1891The four-stroke engine that moved the 20th century.
Alfred Nobel
1833 – 1896Invented dynamite, then endowed the prizes to redeem the legacy.
Karl Benz
1844 – 1929Built and patented the first practical automobile.
Thomas Edison
1847 – 19311,093 patents and the industrial research laboratory itself.
Nikola Tesla
1856 – 1943Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
1856 – 1915Scientific management — the origin of every productivity metric and its discontents.
Henry Ford
1863 – 1947The moving assembly line and the five-dollar day created mass consumer industry.
Alberto Santos-Dumont
1873 – 1932Flew the first publicly witnessed powered aircraft in Europe.
Guglielmo Marconi
1874 – 1937Made radio a transatlantic reality.
Konrad Zuse
1910 – 1995Built the first programmable digital computer, the Z3, in 1941.
Taiichi Ohno
1912 – 1990Designed the Toyota Production System — lean manufacturing worldwide.
Ernő Rubik
b. 1944His cube became a global object lesson in group theory.
Tim Berners-Lee
b. 1955Wrote the web and gave it away for nothing.