The ASEE EngineeringK12 Center welcomes
your feedback! If there is a Famous Engineer you would
like to see listed on our website, send us an email
at outreach@asee.org.
We want to hear your suggestions on how to make our
site a richer resource!
Arts & Entertainment |
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Scott Adams
- cartoonist and creator of "Dilbert" - read
an interview with him in Prism Magazine
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Rowan Atkinson
(Actor/Comedian) - Best known for his starring
roles in the television series Blackadder
and Mr. Bean, Atkinson attended Manchester
and Oxford University earning an electrical engineering
degree. |
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Alexander Calder
(Artist) - Calder received his degree in
mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of
Technology, Hoboken, N. J., and shortly thereafter
moved to Paris, where he studied art and began to
create his now-famous mobiles. Many of his large
sculptures are on permanent outdoor display at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the
first major retrospective of his work was held in
1950. |
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Frank Capra
(Film director) - This chemical engineering
degree recipient went on to direct films such as
It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
and It's a Wonderful Life. |
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Roger Corman
(Film Director) - Corman directed the original
version of Little Shop of Horrors, and shot it in
a record two days and a night. He received an industrial
engineering degree from Stanford University. |
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Lillian Gilbreth
- Considered a pioneer in the field of time-and-motion
studies, Dr. Gilbreth received her Ph.D. in psychology
from Brown University and was a professor at Purdue's
School of Mechanical Engineering, the Newark School
of Engineering, and the University of Wisconsin.
She is "Member No. 1" of the Society of Women Engineers.
She and her husband used their industrial engineering
skills to run their household, and those efforts
are the subject of the book and family film Cheaper
by the Dozen. |
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Alfred Hitchcock
(Film Director) - British-born American
director and producer of many brilliantly contrived
films, most of them psychological thrillers including
Psycho, The Birds, Rear Window, and North
by Northwest. He was born in London and trained
there as an engineer at Saint Ignatius College.
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Herbie Hancock
(Jazz Musician) - Hancock, before becoming
a jazz musician, studied electrical engineering
at Grinell College. His engineering background would
later help his experimentations in electronic jazz
fusion. |
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Hedy Lamarr
(Actress) - Although not formally trained
as an engineer, this famous 1940s actress is credited
with several sophisticated inventions, among them
a unique anti-jamming device for use against Nazi
radar. Years after her patent expired, the Sylvania
Electronics Systems Division adapted the design
for a device that today speeds satellite communications
around the world. |
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Arthur Nielsen
- graduated summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering
from the University of Wisconsin. His is best known
for developing the Nielsen rating system, which
tells us how popular a television show is. |
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Bill Nye (TV
Personality) - The "Science Guy" received
a mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University
and worked for Boeing. |
CEOs |
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Roberto C. Goizueta
- former chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola,
Co. Chemical engineering degree from Yale University.
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Lee Iacocca
- former chairman and CEO of Chrysler Corp., Iacocca
graduated from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa.,
in 1945 and received a master's degree in engineering
from Princeton University in 1946. |
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John F. Welch
Jr. - received his engineering undergraduate
degree in his home state at the University of Massachusetts.
After he earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering
from the University of Illinois, he accepted a job
offer from General Electric. He became chairman
and CEO of General Electric in 1981. |
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Philip Condit
- CEO, the Boeing Co., mechanical/aeronautical engineering. |
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James Morgan
- CEO, Applied Materials, mechanical engineer. In
1996 he received the National Medal of Technology
for his industry leadership and for his vision in
building Applied Materials into the world's leading
semiconductor equipment company, a major exporter
and a global technology pioneer that helps enable
the Information Age. |
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Edmund T. Pratt,
Jr. - former CEO of Pfizer Inc. Pratt is
an electrical engineer. |
Company Founders |
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Andrew Grove
- co-founder of Intel, and a chemical engineer. |
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William Hewlett
and David Packard - co-founders
of Hewlett-Packard. |
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Bill Joy
- Joy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He
received a B.S.E.E. in electrical engineering from
the University of Michigan in 1975, after which
he attended graduate school at U.C.—Berkeley,
where he was the principal designer of Berkeley
UNIX (BSD) and received a M.S. in electrical engineering
and computer science. In 1997, Joy was appointed
by President Clinton as co-chairman of the Presidential
Information Technology Advisory Committee. |
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Steve Wozniak
- Co-founded Apple Computer Inc. in 1976 with the
Apple I computer. Wozniak's Apple II personal computer
— introduced in 1977 and featuring a central
processing unit (CPU), keyboard, floppy disk drive,
and a $1,300 price tag — helped launch the
PC industry. Wozniak left Apple in 1981 and went
back to Berkeley and finished his degree in electrical
engineering/computer science. Since then, he has
been involved in various business and philanthropic
ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities
in schools, including an initiative in 1990 to place
computers in schools in the former Soviet Union.
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Ray Dolby
- audio system innovator and founder of Dolby Laboratories.
His technical expertise has won him both an Academy
Award and a Grammy. |
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Henry Ford
- Ford helped devise what revolutionized the auto
industry and what he is most remembered for—the
continuous moving assembly line. In 1908, Henry
Ford ushered in a new era of personal transportation
in the United States. His invention of the Model
T automobile, made it possible for the general public
to buy a sturdy, reliable, and easy to operate vehicle
for a price that was highly affordable. The success
of the Model T served to popularize personal vehicles
to such an extent that today, over 100 million US
households own an average of 2 automobiles each!
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Katherine Stinson
- the first female graduate of N.C. State
University's College of Engineering. Initially denied
admission as a freshman, Stinson went on to become
one of N.C. State's most distinguished and active
alumni. Graduating vice president of her class,
she was soon hired by the Civil Aeronautics Administration
as its first female engineer. Later, she served
as technical assistant chief in its Engineering
and Manufacturing Division until her retirement
in 1973. She went on to found the Society of Women
Engineers. |
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Craig Newmark
- was living in San Francisco handling computer
security for the brokerage Charles Schwab, and for
fun began an online list of things to do in the
area. He then developed software that would allow
E-mails to automatically post information to the
site. It became a sort of Internet classified section,
listing not only upcoming events, but stuff for
sale, jobs, personals, etc. Craigslist today encompasses
more than 100 cities on five continents and has
5 million unique visitors a day. Newmark, who has
bachelor's and master's degrees from Case Western
Reserve University's school of electrical engineering
and computer science. |
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Sergei Brin
and Larry Page - were two computer
nuts who first met at Stanford University a decade
ago while earning graduate degrees in computer science.
Brin, a native of Moscow, had a B.S. in mathematics
from the University of Maryland. Page, from Ann
Arbor, had an engineering B.S. from the University
of Michigan. They didn't get along at first, but
their friendship grew as Brin and Page toiled in
the dorm, seeking a new way to search the Internet.
The fruits of their labor: Google, the Internet's
most popular search engine. Google became a publicly
traded company in August 2004. The company is now
valued at $60 billion. |
Politicians |
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Jimmy Carter
- The 39th President of the United States. President
Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and
the Georgia Institute of Technology and received
a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy
in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving
in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising
to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman
Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was
assigned to Schenectady, N.Y., where he took graduate
work at Union College in reactor technology and
nuclear physics and served as senior officer of
the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf. |
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Herbert Hoover
- having graduated from Stanford University in California,
Hoover was a 26 -year-old mining engineer in Tientsin,
China, when the city was attacked by 5,000 Chinese
troops and 25,000 members of the martial arts group
known as the Boxers. (The Boxer Rebellion was a
violent 1900 uprising against foreign business interests
in China.) Hoover took charge of setting up barricades
to protect Tientsin until its rescue after 28 days
of bombardment. Thirty years later, Herbert Hoover
became the 31st president of the United States;
he and his wife continued to speak Chinese when
they wanted privacy in the White House. |
Inventors and Leaders
in their Field |
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Neil Alden Armstrong
- became the first man to walk on the moon on July
20, 1969, at 10:56 p.m. EDT. He and "Buzz" Aldrin
spent about two and one-half hours walking on the
moon, while pilot Michael Collins waited above in
the Apollo 11 command module. Armstrong received
his B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Purdue
University and an M.S. in aerospace engineering
from the University of Southern California. |
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Leonardo da
Vinci - Florentine artist, one of the great
masters of the High Renaissance, celebrated as a
painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist.
His profound love of knowledge and research was
the keynote of both his artistic and scientific
endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting
influenced the course of Italian art for more than
a century after his death, and his scientific studies
- particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics,
and hydraulics - anticipated many of the developments
of modern science. |
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Thomas Edison
- Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime,
earning him the nickname the "Wizard of Menlo Park."
The most famous of his inventions was an incandescent
light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed
the phonograph and the kinetoscope, a small box
for viewing moving films. He also improved upon
the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph,
and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. Edison was
quoted as saying, "Genius is 1 percent inspiration
and 99 percent perspiration." |
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Edwin Howard
Armstrong - His crowning achievement in
1933 was the invention of wide-band frequency modulation,
now known as FM radio. Armstrong earned a degree
in electrical engineering from Columbia University
in 1913. |
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Alexander Graham
Bell - inventor of the telephone. He also
worked in medical research and invented techniques
for teaching speech to the deaf. In 1888 he founded
the National Geographic Society. |
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William D. Coolidge's
name is inseparably linked with the X-ray tube —
popularly called the 'Coolidge tube.' This invention
completely revolutionized the generation of X-rays
and remains to this day the model upon which all
X-ray tubes for medical applications are patterned.
Coolidge graduated from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1896, majoring in electrical engineering. |
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George de Mestral
-attended the Ecole Polytechnique Federale
de Lausanne, Switzerland, where he graduated as
an electrical engineer. In 1955 the "hook and loop
fastener" he created was patented under the name
Velcro, which was derived from two French words:
velour and crochet ("velvet" and "hooks"). |
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Rudolf Diesel
- Though best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited
heat engine that bears his name, the French-born
Diesel was also an eminent thermal engineer. |
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Bonnie Dunbar
- NASA astronaut who earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees
in ceramic engineering from the University of Washington
and a doctorate in mechanical/biomedical engineering
from the University of Houston. While working at
Rockwell International, Dr. Dunbar helped to develop
the ceramic tiles that enable space shuttles to
survive re-entry. She has had an opportunity to
test those tiles firsthand as a four-time astronaut,
including a stint on the first shuttle mission to
dock with the Russian Space Station Mir. |
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Reginald A.
Fessenden - Canadian-born American physicist
and electrical engineer who is known for his early
work in wireless communication. After designing
a high-frequency alternator, in 1906 he broadcast
the first program of speech and music ever transmitted
by radio. That same year, he established two-way
trans-Atlantic wireless telegraph communication. |
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Yuan-Cheng
Fung - Fung is widely recognized as the
father of biomechanics, having established the fundamentals
of biomechanical properties in many of the human
body's organs and tissues. He founded the bioengineering
program at the University of California—San
Diego. In November 2001 he became the first bioengineer
to receive the president's National Medal of Science,
the nation's highest scientific honor. |
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Robert Hutchings
Goddard pioneered modern rocketry and space
flight and founded a whole field of science and
engineering. Goddard conducted static tests with
small solid-fuel rockets at Worcester Tech as early
as 1908, and in 1912 he developed the detailed mathematical
theory of rocket propulsion. In 1915 he proved that
rocket engines could produce thrust in a vacuum
and therefore make space flight possible. He succeeded
in developing several types of solid-fuel rockets
to be fired from hand-held or tripod-mounted launching
tubes, which were the basis of the bazooka and other
powerful rocket weapons of World War II. At the
time of his death, Goddard held 214 patents in rocketry. |
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Beulah Louise
Henry was known in the 1920s and '30s as
"the lady Edison" for the many inventions she patented,
including a vacuum ice cream freezer, a typewriter
that made multiple copies without carbon paper,
and a bobbin-less lockstitch sewing machine. Henry
founded manufacturing companies to produce her creations,
making a fortune in the process. |
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Grace Murray
Hopper, a computer engineer and Rear Admiral
in the U.S. Navy, developed the first computer compiler
in 1952 and the computer program language COBOL.
Upon discovering that a moth had jammed the works
of an early computer, Hopper popularized the term
"bug." In 1983, by special presidential appointment,
Hopper was promoted to the rank of Commodore. Two
years later, she became one of the first women to
be elevated to the rank of Rear Admiral. After retiring,
she spent the remainder of her life as a senior
consultant to Digital Equipment Corp. Hopper received
numerous honors over the course of her lifetime.
In 1969, the Data Processing Management Association
awarded her the first Computer Science Man-of-the-Year
Award. She became the first person from the United
States and the first woman to be made a Distinguished
Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1973.
She also received multiple honorary doctorates from
universities across the nation. The Navy christened
a ship in her honor. In September 1991, she was
awarded the National Medal of Technology, the nation's
highest honor in engineering and technology. |
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Jack Kilby
- Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000
for his work with the integrated circuit. Kilby
received a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of
Illinois in 1947 and an M.S.E.E. from the University
of Wisconsin in 1950. |
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Elijah McCoy
was a Black inventor who was awarded over
57 patents. The son of runaway slaves from Kentucky,
he was born in Canada and lived there as a youth.
Educated in Scotland as a mechanical engineer, he
returned to Detroit and in 1872 invented a lubricator
for steam engines. His new oiling device revolutionized
the industrial machine industry by allowing machines
to remain in motion while being oiled. This device,
although imitated by other designers, was so successful
that people inspecting new equipment would ask if
it contained the "real McCoy." |
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Guglielmo Marconi
- Known as the "Father of Radio," Marconi
received many honors including the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1909. |
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Arati Prabhakar
- Currently a venture capitalist, from 1993-1997
Prabhakar was director of the US National Institute
of Standards and Technology, appointed by President
Clinton. From 1984 to 1986, Dr. Prabhakar served
as a Congressional Fellow in the Office of Technology
Assessment of the U.S. Congress where she wrote
on microelectronics research and development for
the House Science, Research and Technology Subcommittee.
Dr. Prabhakar served for two years as Director of
the Microelectronics Technology Office in the Defense
Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),
where she had managed advanced electronics research
since 1986. She created the Microelectronics Technology
Office to drive research, development, and demonstration
of advanced microelectronics technologies critical
to national security, with an emphasis on dual-use
technologies. She holds the distinction of being
the first woman with a doctorate from the California
Institute of Technology, and was also the youngest
director of the institute. |
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Judith Resnik
- Challenger astronaut, electrical engineer. Received
a bachelors of science degree in electrical engineering
from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970 and a doctorate
in electrical engineering from the University of
Maryland in 1977. |
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George Westinghouse
- invented a system of air brakes that made travel
by train safe and built one of the greatest electric
manufacturing organizations in the United States.
In 1886, he founded the Westinghouse Electric Co.,
foreseeing the possibilities of alternating current
as opposed to direct current, which was limited
to a radius of two or three miles. Westinghouse
enlisted the services of Nikola Tesla and other
inventors in the development of alternating current
motors and apparatus for the transmission of high-tension
current, pioneering large-scale municipal lighting. |
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Eli Whitney
- American inventor, pioneer, mechanical engineer,
and manufacturer, Eli Whitney is best remembered
as the inventor of the cotton gin. He also affected
the industrial development of the United States
when, in manufacturing muskets for the government,
he translated the concept of interchangeable parts
into a manufacturing system, giving birth to the
American mass-production concept. |
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Lonnie Johnson
spent more than a decade in high-level posts within
the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. Air
Force, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. He was, in
short, a rocket scientist, albeit one with a B.S.
in mechanical engineering and a master's in nuclear
engineering. But what sent his already high-flying
career into orbit was the invention of an extremely
popular toy: the Super Soaker. Johnson was working
on creating an environmentally friendly heat pump
when he hooked a high-pressure nozzle to his bathroom
sink. Out shot a powerful jet stream of water, and
Johnson immediately saw its potential as a squirt
gun. After making successful prototypes for his
daughter and neighborhood friends, he licensed the
Super Soaker to Larami Corp. in 1989. Sales for
the Super Soaker have totaled nearly $1 billion
since its launch, and it continues to be one of
the world's top-selling toys. |
The ASEE EngineeringK12 Center welcomes your feedback!
If there is a Famous Engineer you would like to see
listed on our website, send us an email at outreach@asee.org.
We want to hear your suggestions on how to make our
site a richer resource!
|
