In the 17th century, German scientist Otto von Guericke built and carried out experiments with a sulfur globe that produced static electricity.

Applying discoveries Michael Faraday had made a few decades earlier, William Stanley designed the first commercial transformer for Westinghouse in 1886.

Although not as celebrated as many other scientific inventions, the smoothing iron has its own rich history of development stretching all the way from 400 B.C. to the present.

Read about the device used for measuring resistance in a circuit which was discovered in 1843, but had been invented a decade earlier. The inventor's name was not Wheatstone.

Walter Houser Brattain discovered the photo-effect that occurs at the free surface of a semiconductor and was co-creator of the point-contact transistor, which paved the way for the more advanced types of transistors that eventually...

Gerd Binnig co-developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with Heinrich Rohrer. The STM allowed scientists entry into the atomic world in a new way and was a major advance in the field of nanotechnology. For their achievement,...

J. Georg Bednorz jointly revolutionized superconductivity research with K. Alex Muller by discovering an entirely new class of superconductors, often referred to as high-temperature superconductors. They managed to achieve...

In the modern world, virtually everyone is familiar with electricity as an accessible, essential form of energy. In electricity's earlier days, scientists used the buildup and release of static electricity.

Willem Einthoven invented a string galvanometer that lead to the electrocardiogram, which measures heart activity. For his discovery, Einthoven was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924.

American inventor Lee De Forest was a pioneer of radio and motion pictures. He received more than 300 patents over the course of his lifetime, the most important of which was for a three-electrode vacuum tube, or triode, that he called...

Humphry Davy was a pioneer in the field of electrochemistry who used electrolysis to isolate many elements from the compounds in which they occur naturally. Electrolysis is the process by which an electrolyte is altered or decomposed via...

English scientist William Crookes was very innovative in his investigations with vacuum tubes and designed a variety of different types to be used in his experimental work. Crookes tubes are glass vacuum chambers that contain a positive...

Born in Palo Alto, California, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts - homes to Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively - you could say Eric Cornell was destined to become a renowned scientist. And while he...

Leon Cooper shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Robert Schrieffer, with whom he developed the first widely accepted theory of superconductivity. Termed the BCS theory, it is heavily based on a phenomenon known as...

The discovery of radio waves, which was widely seen as confirmation of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and paved the way for numerous advances in communication technology, was made by German physicist Heinrich Hertz. In the...

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who pioneered the construction of strong, practical electromagnets and built one of the first electromagnetic motors. During his experiments with electromagnetism, Henry discovered the property of...

Murray Gell-Mann is a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his contributions to elementary particle physics. He is particularly well known for his role in bringing organization into the world of subatomic...

Luigi Galvani was a pioneer in the field of electrophysiology, the branch of science concerned with electrical phenomena in the body. His experiments with dissected frogs and electrical charges led him to suggest the existence of a...

Enrico Fermi was a titan of twentieth-century physics. He outlined the statistical laws that govern the behavior of particles that abide by the Pauli exclusion principle and developed a theoretical model of the atom in his mid-twenties....

A self-educated man with a brilliant mind, Michael Faraday was born in a hardscrabble neighborhood in London. Through the combination of insatiable curiosity and a powerful will to succeed, he transcended his austere beginnings to...

While growing up in the Soviet Union, Lev Landau was so far ahead of his classmates that he was ready to begin college at age 13. His parents noticed a particular gift for math in their young son, who was considered a prodigy. It came as...

For a man whose career involved the entire known universe, John Kraus had a remarkably insular upbringing. He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics, all at the...

Klaus von Klitzing is a Nobel laureate who won the award in 1985 for his discovery of the quantized Hall effect, sometimes referred to as the quantum Hall effect. Von Klitzing's discovery resulted from his work exploring a phenomenon...

The integrated circuit fueled the rise of microelectronics in the latter half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the Information Age. An American engineer, Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit in 1958, shortly after he...