Alexander Graham Bell

Inventor of the

telephone

He was born in Scotland in 1847. As a boy, he wanted to be an inventor. He only attended school for five years; from the time he was ten until he was fourteen, but he never stopped learning. He read the books in his grandfather's library and studied tutorials . 

He taught speech to deaf students and was a professor at Boston University. His interest in speech led him to experiment with transmitting speech electronically.

When he was a teenager, he and his brother Melly used the voice box of a dead sheep to make a speaking machine that cried, "Mama!" This created even more interest in human speech and how it worked. 

While he was teaching he met Mabel Hubbard, one of his students who was 10 years younger than he. Mabel had become deaf at the age of four due to scarlet fever. Five years after their meeting they were married. They had two daughters and two sons. Their sons both died at a young age.

He worked hard on his invention with the help of an assistant named Thomas Watson. He and Watson worked together to make sound-wave vibrations travel from one end of a wire to the other. He studied the telegraph and wanted to make the wire carry voices instead of letters or words.

One day when working in the lab, Watson could hear in the other room, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you to see.” Watson could hear his voice through the wire. He had invented a telephone.

Thomas Edison

Inventor of the

Phonograph

He was a very curious child. He was always asking questions. Even his mother, who had once been a schoolteacher could not answer all his questions. He would experiment to try to find the answers. Once he tried to hatch some eggs by sitting on them. Another time he accidently burned down the family's barn.

The teacher told someone she thought there was something wrong with him; that he was "addled" . He told his mother and they took him out of the school. He only went to school for 3 months in his whole life. Afterwards , he was taught at home.

When he was 22 years old he went to New York. He only had $1 in his pocket. He hunted for a job during the day, and at night he slept in the basement of a gold company. He watched everything around him very closely. Some equipment broke down and Edison was able to fix it because he had been watching it work before he went to sleep each night. The owners gave him a job. He improved the machine so much the company paid him $40,000 for his invention. He started the American Telegraph Works in New Jersey.

He built a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was here with his employees he made many of his inventions. He would work night after night, and sometimes he would fall asleep at his workbench. His wife wouldn't see him for days at a time.

After he had made the light bulb, he worked to make a power system so people could use the bulb. In 1882 he flipped a switch and 85 houses in New York City had electric lights for the first time.

He was probably the world's greatest inventor. He had a patent on 1,093 inventions. In addition to the electric light, he also invented the phonograph, a camera to take motion pictures, a cement mixer, the automatic telegraph, and he improved Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

Albert Einstein

Genius Scientist

He was born in Ulm, Germany. When he was very young he was slow in development. He didn't speak until he was two years old, and even when he was older he had trouble answering a question. He would first silently mouth the words to himself and then slowly answer out loud. His teachers thought he would never be successful at anything.

His Uncle Jakob was a strong influence in his life. Uncle Jakob gave him math books about algebra *and geometry*. He made learning fun for the boy and also provided a model for teaching that he would later use. In the future he would explain his theories by using examples of trains, elevators, and ships.

After college he took a job at the Swiss Patent Office examining patents* for people's inventions. This job was ideal for him because he had a lot of free time for research about things that really interested him; things such as light and time.

The year 1905 was an exceptional year for him. In that year he published three outstanding papers. #1. He outlined his photoelectric* law in which he discussed the behavior of light. This led to the development of television and motion pictures with sound. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this paper.#2. The second paper, which was his most famous, explored the relation of mass to energy (E=mc squared) and addressed the problem of atomic energy. #3. The third paper was On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies which is also known as the Special Theory of Relativity

In 1933 when he was visiting in the United States, the Germans stole his property and took away his German citizenship. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey invited him to be their director. He spent the rest of his life in America. After a few years he became a U.S. citizen.

He was married two times; first to Mileva Maric with whom he had studied at the Polytechnic Academy. She was very smart and was a lot of help to Albert. They were married for sixteen years and had three children together, a daughter Lieserl and two sons, Eduard and Hans Albert. His second wife was Elsa, who was his first cousin. She had two daughters from a previous marriage. At the end of his life he was a lonely man. His wife Elsa died after they had been married for seventeen years. His health began to fail and he died at the age of 76.

Henry Ford

Founder of the assembly

line

He was born on a farm near Detroit, Michigan.  As a child he was fascinated by machines. He always carried around in his pockets nuts and bolts and machinery parts. By the time he was thirteen he could put together a watch that kept time. This interest in machines led him to work for a while as an apprentice machinist. Clara Bryant became his wife in 1888. He returned to the farm, built a house, and ran a sawmill. They had one child, a son they named Edsel. 

The first car he made was a "gasoline buggy" called the Quadricycle. He drove it around for two years, and it drew a crowd everywhere he went. In 1903 he built two race cars to advertise the automobile. One he named the "999" and the other the "Arrow". In 1904 he himself driving the Ford Arrow set a new land speed record in his car - over 91 miles per hour!

When he was forty years old Ford and eleven investors formed the Ford Motor Company. They had a $28,000 investment in it. The Model T Ford was introduced on October 1, 1908. Some called it the "Tin Lizzie" and the "Flivver". The cost of the touring car: $950. Five years later he started using an assembly line and could produce cars faster and cheaper until the price of the touring car fell to $360. Assembly lines had been used before, but he was the first to use conveyor belts to move the parts where they needed them.

He had a heart attack in 1938 and turned the running of the company over to his son, but Edsel died five years later, and he had to again assume leadership. He stayed in that position for two years, but due to his ill health, he made his grandson president of the company in 1945.

He died at the age of 83. He was one of many people who helped to make America great. At the end of his book he describes his vision of a great country in which the resources of a country and the skills of its people are developed so that all have a fair share.

Benjamin Franklin

Inventor of the lightning

rod

He was born into a large family. He was the 15th child of seventeen children in the family. His father, Josiah, was a candle maker. Benjamin helped him make candles and soap.

When he was twelve years old his father apprenticed him to his older brother James, who was a printer. Ben had to sign "articles of indenture "; a contract that bound him to work for James for nine years until he was 21 years old! He worked twelve hours a day in the printing shop, but still found time to educate himself. Though he only had two years of formal schooling, he taught himself foreign languages and read books on grammar, science, and math.

He ran away and went to Philadelphia. He started his own successful printing business and published a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, for many years. He is most famous for "Poor Richard's Almanack" which he published for 25 years. People frequently quote from his sayings such things as, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise“ and "A penny saved is a penny earned".

He started the Junto club where people could come together to exchange ideas. As a result of these meetings he started the first library in America, the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia, and the first hospital in Pennsylvania. They appointed him postmaster and he created a working postal system. He even created the "Dead Letter Office"

He invented bifocal glasses so he would not have to switch glasses when looking at things far away and close up. He invented the lightning rod to protect people's homes from being destroyed by lightning. He invented the Franklin stove which provided better heat for their homes. He proved that lightning and electricity are the same thing using a kite, string, and key in a thunderstorm. He served as a diplomat to France and spent about 10 years away from his family to further the cause of American independence. He helped to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

Some say when he died in 1790 the whole civilized world went into mourning. 20,000 people honored him at his funeral in Philadelphia. People still visit his grave today and throw pennies on his headstone. Every year $6,000 worth of pennies are collected and given in his honor to help the poor.

Marie Curie

Winner of two Nobel

prizes

She was born in 1867 in Poland when that part of the country was under Russian rule. She was the youngest of five children. She had a brother and three older sisters. When she was four years old one of her older sisters taught her the alphabet, and she learned how to read. In fact, she could read better than Bronya who had taught her.

She wanted to study when she returned to Warsaw, but there was no money to send her away to college. She and her sister did private tutoring to earn money. She told her sister she would work to send her to school, then when Bronya became a doctor, she could return the favor. That's what they did. She became a governess (nanny) to a family in the country and also had an opportunity to teach several children to read and write.

Her sister invited her to come to Paris to live and begin her studies.. At the Sorbonne, the university, she chose to study mathematics and physics. While studying there she lived in a cold apartment and survived on very little food, but when she graduated she had the highest grades in the class. She had a master's degree in physics. Then she was awarded a scholarship and was able to study further to get a master's degree in mathematics. She would also later receive a doctorate in physics.

She met Pierre Curie and they married in 1895. Pierre and Marie began experimenting together and discovered two new radioactive elements. In 1903 Pierre and Marie along with Henri Becquerel (ahn REE beck REL) received the Nobel Prize* in physics for their work and their discovery of radioactivity* . The money they received made life a little easier, and they also used some of it to help friends and family members. In 1911 she was again awarded the Nobel Prize for discovery of the two new elementspolonium and radium.

The Curies had two daughters, Irene and Eve. They were good, loving parents. Pierre was offered a professor's job at the Sorbonne. Life seemed to be getting easier for them. Then the unthinkable happened; Pierre was killed when he stepped out in front of a wagon being pulled by horses. She was in shock. What would she do without him? She felt like only half a person with Pierre gone, but she was strong and able to continue their work. They let her start teaching his classes at the Sorbonne. She was the first woman to teach at the university.

During the First World War she determined she could best serve by outfitting some cars with x-ray machines which could be taken to the battlefield hospitals. Bullets could be located with x-rays to help the doctors treat the wounded soldiers. She trained 150 women to become x-ray technicians.

Isaac Newton

Scientist who created

the laws of motion

When he was a boy, he was more interested in making mechanical devices than in studying. He made a windmill which could grind wheat and corn, and he made a water clock and a sundial. His teachers thought of him as a poor student.

He wanted to go to college, but he didn't have the money to go. He enrolled at the lowest entry. In this position he had to serve the other students by running errands for them. He even ate the leftovers of their meals, but he would do anything to get an opportunity to learn. Even when he was in college, he was not outstanding and received no awards. When the university shut down because of the plague, he went home and continued to study on his own. He had a notebook with 140 blank pages and he began to fill them with notes as he read and experimented.

One day when he was drinking tea in the garden, he saw an apple fall to the ground. He started thinking about why it fell, and finally concluded that the same force which caused the apple to fall also kept the moon in orbit around the earth. This same force, gravity, also kept the planets in orbit around the sun. The apple incident led to his basic laws of motion: An object in motion tends to remain in motion unless an external force stops it, an object moves in a straight line unless some force diverts it; and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

His second discovery was about light and the properties of light. He spent months in a darkened room doing experiments. He passed a beam of sunlight through a prism and discovered that the beam of light was broken down into different colors. His conclusion: something that appears green, such as grass, looks green because it reflects the green light in the sun and absorbs most of the other colors.

His third great discovery was in the field of math when he developed a kind of math we call calculus. He was just 24 years old at the time. However, he did not publish his findings for about 20 years.

In 1696 he became the head of the mint where the coins were made. People were making their own coins. So the mint started replacing all the coins with new coins. He would dress up in disguises so no one would know him, and he would go out on the streets of London to try and catch the people making their own coins. He was successful in capturing the people who were responsible.