There were a large number of great inventors in thr time of Industrial Revolution, such as:
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Samuel Morse invented a number of improvements to the telegraph, including the prototype of the code used to transmit telegraphic messages. He was also telegraphy's greatest public promoter.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1791. His family was wealthy and well connected. "Finley's" first career was painting, which he studied in the US and Europe. He became a member of Britain's Royal Academy, and helped found the National Academy of Design in New York City. (He also twice ran for Mayor of New York, unsuccessfully.)
In 1832, Morse became intrigued by the telegraph, a device first proposed in 1753 and first built in 1774. Through 1833, the machines were impractical, requiring 26 separate wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. In that year, two German engineers had invented a five-wire model; but Morse wanted to be the first to reduce the number of wires to one. In 1838, Morse made this possible by creating a code that used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits.
In 1842, Morse convinced Congress to provide $30,000 (nearly $500,000 in 2000 money) in support of his plan to "wire" the United States. Meanwhile, Morse --- who shined as an "ideas man&quoot; but was not a competent engineer --- solicited and received advice from a number of American and European telegraphy experts, including Joseph Henry of Princeton, who had invented a working telegraph in 1831, and Louis Breguet of Paris, from whose long-distance telegraph Morse actually stole an essential component. Most of the mechanical development of Morse's telegraph and its code was done by his assistants, most notably Alfred Vail and William Baxter.
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THOMAS ALVA EDISON (1847-1931) 
Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. In 1854, his family moved to Port Huron, Michigan. There, "Al's" favorite hobbies were reading, and performing chemistry experiments in his basement lab. But his teachers considered young Edison a failure; and his mother soon decided to home-school him.
Edison's first job (1859) was operating a newstand on the railroad that ran from Port Huron to Detroit. To make the trips more interesting, Edison installed a printing press and chemistry lab in a boxcar. In 1862, he learned to use a railroad telegraph. Edison then spent many years traveling around Canada and the US, working as a telegraph operator and doing scientific experiments in his free time. Finally, in 1869, he decided to become a full-time inventor.
On June 1st of that year, Edison was granted his first patent (#90,646), for an electric voting machine. But no one wanted to use the machine, and Edison resolved never again to invent what would not sell. His next invention fared much better: an improved stock market tickertape machine (1869), which earned him an instant $40,000 [about $700,000 today]. With his friend Franklin T. Pope, Edison formed an electrical engineering firm, based in Newark, New Jersey. With Pope, and later alone, Edison eventually earned about 200 patents for telegraph systems and devices.
In 1876, in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison founded his famous "invention factory." "The Wizard of Menlo Park" was a workaholic and a demanding employer, but he did not resent failures in the lab: "That's one more way it won't work, so we're closer to a solution." Edison's first great Menlo Park invention was the phonograph (1877), although he did not bring it to market for ten years. He was busy with his greatest project: a workable electric light system that would replace candles and gaslight forever, at home and in public.
In 1878, Edison created his prototype incandescent light bulb: a thin strip of paper, attached to wires, enclosed in a vacuum inside a glass bulb. When electricity flowed into the paper "filament," it heated up, and glowed. The only problem was that the paper burnt out very quickly. After thousands of tests, an "Edison Pioneer," Lewis H. Latimer, found the optimal filament material: carbonized cotton thread (1897).
By that time, Edison had built a new and much bigger research complex (now a National Monument) in West Orange, New Jersey. There his first project was to redesign his phonograph, in light of recent improvements by others. Edison soon marketed a wax-cylinder phonograph as a dictation machine (1888), and later, as a musical home entertainment system (1896). These commercial efforts were, by and large, failures, but Edison continued to refine his favorite invention into the 1920s.
In 1889, an associate, William Dickson, working at Edison's direction, invented the celluloid-strip motion picture camera and projector (1889) --- whose silent movies were viewed inside the machine, through a peephole. Although Edison later broke with Dickson, George Eastman and others helped Edison to establish the basis of the motion picture industry.
After 1911, Edison was mainly dissatisfied in his work, feeling that many of his ideas were being ignored or worse yet, stolen. Throughout the '20s, he also had poor health. He died on October 18, 1931, at the age of 84.
It must be said that Edison used other inventors' ideas much more freely than he shared his own. For example, the wax cylinder phonograph was first patented by Chichester A. Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter (1886), whose offer of a joint venture Edison rejected; the disc "gramophone" was first patented by Emile Berliner (1887); and even the so-called "Edison Effect," the observed emission of electrons from a hot filament, was actually discovered by an Edison engineer named William J. Hammer (1883).
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James
Watt, the son of a merchant, was born in Greenock, Scotland, in
1736. At the age of nineteen Watt was sent to Glasgow to learn
the trade of a mathematical-instrument maker.
After spending a year in London, Watt returned to Glasgow in 1757
where he established his own instrument-making business. Watt
soon developed a reputation as a high quality engineer and was
employed on the Forth & Clyde Canal and the Caledonian Canal.
He was also engaged in the improvement of harbours and in the
deepening of the Forth, Clyde and other rivers in Scotland.
In 1763 Watt was sent a Newcomen steam engine to repair. While
putting it back into working order, Watt discovered how he could
make the engine more efficient. Watt worked on the idea for
several months and eventually produced a steam engine that cooled
the used steam in a condenser separate from the main cylinder.
James Watt was not a wealthy man so he decided to seek a partner
with money. John Roebuck, the owner of a Scottish ironworks,
agreed to provide financial backing for Watt's project.
When Roebuck went bankrupt in 1773, Watt took his ideas to
Matthew Boulton, a successful businessman from Birmingham. For
the next eleven years Boulton's factory producing and selling
Watt's steam-engines. These machines were mainly sold to colliery
owners who used them to pump water from their mines. Watt's
machine was very popular because it was four times more powerful
than those that had been based on the Thomas Newcomen design.
Watt continued to experiment and in 1781 he produced a
rotary-motion steam engine. Whereas his earlier machine, with its
up-and-down pumping action, was ideal for draining mines, this
new steam engine could be used to drive many different types of
machinery. Richard Arkwright was quick to importance of this new
invention, and in 1783 he began using Watt's steam-engine in his
textile factories. Others followed his lead and by 1800 there
were over 500 of Watt's machines in Britain's mines and
factories.
In 1755 Watt had been granted a patent by Parliament that
prevented anybody else from making a steam-engine like the one he
had developed. For the next twenty-five years, the Boulton &
Watt company had a virtual monopoly over the production of
steam-engines. Watt charged his customers a premium for using his
steam engines. To justify this he compared his machine to a
horse. Watt calculated that a horse exerted a pull of 180 lb.,
therefore, when he made a machine, he described its power in
relation to a horse, i.e. "a 20 horse-power engine".
Watt worked out how much each company saved by using his machine
rather than a team of horses. The company then had to pay him one
third of this figure every year, for the next twenty-five years.
When James Watt died in 1800 he was a very wealthy man.
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John Kay was the son of a wool manufacturer in Bury, Lancashire. He was just a young man when he became the manager of one of his father's mills. Kay developed skills as a machinist and engineer. He made many improvements to the machines in the mill.
In May 1733, Kay patented his "New Engine of Machine for Opening and Dressing Wool". This machine included the Flying Shuttle. Before the invention of the Flying Shuttle, weavers had to pass the shuttle through the warp threads by hand. Kay's invention put the shuttle on wheels and controlled it with a driver. The weaver operated the shuttle by pulling a cord attached to the driver. When this cord was pulled to the left, the driver caused the shuttle to shoot ("fly") through the warp in the same direction. Pulling the cord to the right sent the shuttle back.
The Flying Shuttle was able to do the work of two people even more quickly. In 1753, an angry mob of weavers, afraid of the competition, wrecked Kay's house and destroyed his looms. However, since it halved labour costs, the textile industry was quick to adopt Kay's invention, but it was not so keen to pay him anything for it. The manufacturers formed an association which refused to pay Kay any royalties.
Kay lost all of his money in legal battles to defend his patent. He eventually moved to France where he is thought to have died a poor man.
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Since earliest times seeds had always been sown by hand. People who worked on the land would walk over the fields randomly scattering handfuls of grain. Jethro Tull invented a machine which greatly helped to increase the harvest yield by planting seeds in straight lines.
Jethro Tull was born in Basildon, Berkshire in 1674. He did not start out as an agricultural engineer. He studied law and graduated from Oxford University in 1699. Although he was admitted to the bar in the same year, he never practised law. Tull was far more interested in the farming methods employed on his land, which he called Prosperous Farm.
Tull travelled throughout Europe to study new farming techniques. On his return to Prosperous Farm in 1701, he developed a horse-drawn mechanical Seed Drill. The Seed Drill not only planted seeds at regular intervals but also planted them at the right depth and covered them with earth. Because the seed drill planted seeds in straight lines, a mechanical horse-drawn hoe, which Tull also invented, could be used to remove weeds from between the lines of crop plants.
Tull advocated the importance of pulverising (crumbling) the soil so that air and moisture could reach the roots of the crop plants. His horse-drawn hoe was able to do this. He also emphasised the importance of manure and of tilling the soil during the growing season.
At the time, Tull's ideas came under attack, mainly because they were new. His Seed Drill was not immediately popular in England, although it was quickly adopted by the New England colonists across the Atlantic.
In 1731, Tull wrote a book called "Horse-houghing (hoeing) Husbandry" which he revised in 1733. Although his Seed Drill was improved in 1782 by adding gears to the distribution mechanism, the rotary mechanism of the drill provided the foundation for all future sowing technology.
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Marconi was born in
Bologna, Italy.His father was Italian, his mother, Irish. He was
educated first in Bologna and later in Florence. Then he went to
the technical school in Leghorn, where he studied physics.
Marconi received many honors including the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1909. He was sent as a delegate to the Peace
Conference in Paris in 1919, in which capacity he signed the
peace treaties with Austria and Bulgaria.
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In 1895
Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi built the equipment and
transmitted electrical signals through the air from one end of
his house to the other, and then from the house to the garden.
These experiments were, in effect, the dawn of practical wireless
telegraphy or radio.
Following the successes of his experiments at home, Marconi
became obsessed with the idea of sending messages across the
Atlantic. He built a transmitter, 100 times more powerful than
any previous station, at Poldhu, on the southwest tip of England,
and in November 1901 installed a receiving station at St. John's
Newfoundland.
On December 12, 1901, he received signals from across the ocean.
News of this achievement spread around the world, and he was
acclaimed by outstanding scientists, including Thomas A. Edison.
