Inventions & Discoveries – General Knowledge Notes

Inventions:

  • Printing Press, Johannes Gutenberg, 1440
  • Vaccination, Edward Jenner, 1796
  • Steam Engine, James Watt, 1765
  • Electric Motor, Michael Faraday, 1821
  • Computer, Charles Babbage (conceptual), 1822, modern computers (Alan Turing, 1930s-40s)
  • Telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, 1876
  • Light Bulb, Thomas Edison, 1879
  • Automobile, Karl Benz, 1885
  • Radio, Guglielmo Marconi, 1895
  • Airplane, Wilbur and Orville Wright, 1903
  • Television, John Logie Baird, 1927
  • Antibiotics (Penicillin), Alexander Fleming, 1928
  • Nuclear Power, Enrico Fermi (first reactor), 1942
  • Transistor, John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, 1947
  • Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, 1989
  • World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1989

Discoveries:

  • Fire, Prehistoric humans, Over a million years ago
  • Heliocentric Theory, Nicolaus Copernicus, 1543
  • Circulation of Blood, William Harvey, 1628
  • Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation, Sir Isaac Newton, 1687
  • Oxygen, Joseph Priestley, 1774
  • Vaccination, Edward Jenner, 1796
  • The Atom, John Dalton (Modern Atomic Theory), 1803
  • Electricity, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla (various contributions), 18th to 19th century
  • Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, Charles Darwin, 1859
  • Germ Theory of Disease, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, 1860s
  • Periodic Table, Dmitri Mendeleev, 1869
  • X-rays, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, 1895
  • The Electron, J.J. Thomson, 1897
  • Radioactivity, Marie and Pierre Curie, 1898
  • Theory of General Relativity, Albert Einstein, 1915
  • Insulin, Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best, 1921
  • Big Bang Theory, Georges Lemaître, 1927
  • Penicillin, Alexander Fleming, 1928
  • Antibiotics beyond Penicillin (e.g., Streptomycin), Selman Waksman, 1943
  • DNA Double Helix Structure, James Watson, Francis Crick, 1953
  • The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, 1964
  • CRISPR Gene Editing, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, 2012
  • Higgs Boson Particle, CERN (confirmed), 2012