Throughout the centuries, countless inventors and scientists have made significant contributions to our understanding of the world around us. Sadly, not all of them have got the due they deserve, and many still remain out of our history books for one reason or another. That’s despite the fact that so many technologies we use today – like computer programs, wireless devices, films, and others – were developed by these forgotten, overlooked inventors from history.

10. Joseph Glidden

Barbed wire played a crucial role during the westward expansion period in American history. It made it possible to fence in vast tracts of land that were previously open and vulnerable, making it easier for ranchers to control their herds and farmers to protect their crops. It also contributed to the end of the open-range system and the emergence of large-scale agriculture across the country, and it was now much easier to enforce property rights on the ground. 

Joseph Glidden, a farmer and businessman from Illinois, is credited with inventing the first successful barbed wire design in 1874. He had been experimenting with different prototypes for several years, before he chanced upon the idea of wrapping two metal wires together with sharp barbs. Glidden patented his design in 1874 and started manufacturing it on a large scale. Before long, barbed wire was a common sight on farms and ranches throughout the American West, making him one of the most successful inventors and businessmen in American history. 

9. Martin Cooper

Martin Cooper is an American engineer and inventor who is also sometimes called the ‘father of the cellular phone’, as his invention ultimately paved the way for the development of modern smartphones. In 1973, he led the team that built the first mobile cell phone called the Motorola DynaTAC, completely revolutionizing the way we communicate with each other. 

Cooper began his career in the telecommunications industry in the 1950s, working for companies such as Teletype Corporation and Motorola. He started working on the development of a portable cell phone design some time in the late 1960s, that would allow people to make calls from anywhere instead of fixed locations. 

On April 3, 1973, Cooper made the first cell phone call from a Motorola DynaTAC to Joel Engel at AT&T. While the DynaTAC would go on to become the first commercially available cell phone, it was still prohibitively expensive and inaccessible for most people, delaying mass adoption by several years. 

8. Mary Anderson 

The windshield wiper may be an irreplaceable car safety feature today, but that wasn’t always the case. It was invented by Mary Anderson – an American inventor who came up with the idea in 1902, after she observed that drivers at the time had to stop their cars and manually clear snow, rain, and debris from the windshields to improve visibility, which was dangerous and time-consuming. 

Anderson’s earliest prototype comprised a lever that could be used to move a rubber blade across the windshield from inside the car. She patented it in 1903, though it would take many more years before drivers warmed up to the idea. Many car manufacturers were skeptical of the need for a windshield wiper in cars at the time, and were hence slow to adopt the technology. Obviously, they were wrong about it, as windshield wipers are a standard feature in almost every car sold around the world today. Since her invention, Mary Anderson has been awarded a number of honors and awards for her contribution to automotive safety, including her 2011 induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

7. Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel

The mechanical metronome is a device used by musicians to mark time and regulate tempo. It was invented in the early 19th century by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel – a Dutch inventor and clockmaker. Winkel’s ‘musical chronometer’ from 1814 consisted of a pendulum that could be adjusted to different speeds using a sliding weight. He couldn’t patent it, however, and the credit originally went to a German inventor called Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who copied Winkel’s prototype and started selling it under his name. 

Maelzel’s marketing efforts were so successful that the metronome was soon commonly known as the ‘Maelzel Metronome’. Beethoven was the first composer to use metronome markings in his pieces, which would soon become common practice for musicians around the world. While Winkel’s original design was initially forgotten, he is now recognized as the true inventor of the device that changed music forever. Apart from allowing composers to specify exact tempos for their works, the metronome also allowed for the standardization of tempo markings across different styles of music.

6. Henry Blair

Henry Blair was an African-American inventor and farmer credited with the invention of the corn planter in 1836. We’re not sure about his exact origins, though he’s assumed to have been a freedman around the time of the invention, as slaves weren’t allowed to file patents back then.

Blair’s corn planter was a significant improvement over previous methods of planting corn, which usually involved arduous work like digging holes and planting seeds by hand. Blair’s device was a horse-drawn machine that could plant corn seeds in a straight row on a large scale, greatly increasing efficiency and speed.

Blair’s invention made it possible for farmers to plant corn quickly and relatively effortlessly, leading to increased productivity and lower food prices. The corn planter also paved the way for the larger mechanization of agriculture, which played an important role in the early development of industry across America.

5. Peter Durand

Peter Durand was a British merchant known for his patent of the tin can in 1810. Before the invention, preservation was a major challenge for the food industry, as food could only be stored for short periods of time and in limited amounts. Durand’s invention made it possible to keep food items edible for much longer periods of time, as it used a unique sealing technique to make the containers truly airtight. 

The tin can was an important invention that allowed for the transport and storage of food over long distances. It also allowed for the creation of new products and innovations in the industry, as it was suddenly possible to dramatically increase shelf life of food products and other perishable items. While other tin can designs had existed before Durand’s patent, his invention involved sealing food in a tin container using a soldered lead plug, making it much more airtight and commercially-viable.

4. John Harrison

Before the invention of the marine chronometer, determining longitude at sea was a difficult and often inaccurate process. Sailors relied on celestial navigation and dead reckoning, which could be affected by weather conditions and human error. This made long-distance seafaring extremely dangerous, resulting in a number of shipwrecks. In the 18th century, the British government even offered a prize of £20,000 to anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea.

John Harrison, a self-taught carpenter, took up the challenge and invented a series of precision clocks known as marine chronometers in 1735. These early navigation devices allowed sailors to determine longitude with precision and navigate with much greater safety and efficiency. Harrison’s first marine chronometer was tested on a voyage to Jamaica, and it was found to be accurate within a distance of 18 geographical miles. The invention led to increased trade and commerce around the world, directly contributing to the rise of the British Empire. 

3. Garrett A. Morgan

Born on March 4, 1877, in Paris, Kentucky, Garrett Augustus Morgan was an African-American inventor credited with important inventions in public safety. He invented the gas mask and the traffic signal, two inventions that have saved countless lives ever since. While the mask was designed to protect people from the harmful effects of smoke and gas during fire-related accidents, the traffic signal was intended to prevent on-road accidents and reduce traffic congestion.

The gas mask was patented in 1914, and has since been used by firefighters, police officers, and other first responders to protect them from the effects of smoke and gas during accidents and other similar situations. The original design featured a hood that covered the wearer’s head, along with a breathing tube that filtered out harmful chemicals and smoke. 

The three-position traffic signal, on the other hand, was patented in 1923. It was a crucial innovation in city planning and public safety, especially on busy roads and highways, and has since been used by countries around the world.  

2. Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815 in London, is often referred to as the first computer programmer due to her pioneering work with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine – a hypothetical machine designed to perform complex calculations. She was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and a mathematician mother, and had a natural flair for mathematics and the sciences from a very early age. 

Lovelace’s work on the Analytical Engine – also sometimes called the first computer ever – led her to write what is considered the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. She was also the first mathematician to calculate a sequence of numbers known as Bernoulli numbers, which could be classified as the first computer program ever written. Lovelace’s work on the Analytical Engine was particularly advanced for the time, as it proved that computers could be used to perform complex operations on values other than numbers, like musical notations. 

1. Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge was a British photographer and inventor who made crucial contributions to the invention of motion pictures in the late 19th century. He is best known for his work in stop-motion photography, which involved manually capturing multiple images of a moving subject to create the illusion of motion. 

Muybridge’s most famous work was his early film capturing the motion of horses, which he photographed in a series of still images. He used a series of cameras placed along a track to shoot the horses in motion, followed by a zoopraxiscope – a device he conceptualized and built himself – projecting the images in rapid succession on the screen, creating the first motion picture in history. His innovations opened up new possibilities for visual storytelling, and gave birth to all the movies and other kinds of videos we see around us today. For his contributions, Eadweard Muybridge is still sometimes called the ‘Father of the Motion Picture’.

Two of the names on this list are well-known. However, the others are lesser-known but no less as important. All these inventions, potentially dangerous in themselves, have saved lives, often many, and attracted great attention thanks to the extreme, perilous tests the inventors themselves undertook to prove the safety of their inventions.

10 Elisha Otis

Despite a series of jobs in various businesses, Elisha Otis (1811–1861) never met with much success until 1853, when he thrilled onlookers during an event described as “a dramatic demonstration.”

Riding an open platform up a scaffold resembling the framework of a gigantic guillotine, Otis stood, among barrels and crates, gazing down at the crowd that had assembled to watch the show. People were suspicious of the safety of elevators, fearing that such contraptions might fall, injuring or killing their occupants. Otis’s demonstration would dispel such worries—if he survived.

As the assembly looked on, Otis struck the rope attached to the elevator with an ax, severing it. Surely, in the resulting fall, he would be severely injured, if not killed, the horrified crowd must have thought.

Instead, Otis proved the efficacy of his brake: his safety system worked. Even with the rope severed, the brake prevented the lift from plunging to its destruction and Otis’s injury or death. The public was persuaded that elevators equipped with his invention were safe, and Otis installed his first passenger-carrying safety elevator in a New York department store four years later.

According to Big Ideas That Changed the World, 1.7 million Otis elevators are in service worldwide, not only in skyscrapers but also in such famous landmarks as the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.^[1]

9 Jonas Salk

“History of Salk: About Jonas Salk,” a 2002 article on the Salk Institute for Biological Studies website, recounts how Dr. Salk (1914–1995) developed and tested the vaccine that has virtually eradicated polio.

As an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, Salk learned from his mentor, Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., about the process of developing vaccines. Then, as the director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Salk put his knowledge to use, developing a vaccine against the polio virus.

His approach, using an inactivated polio virus to stimulate vaccine recipients’ immunity systems, was “contrary to the era’s prevailing scientific opinion.” There was also concern that such an approach might infect those who received immunizations, causing severe illness or even death. To test his vaccine and to allay the public’s fears, Salk vaccinated himself, his wife, their children, his lab assistant, and “volunteers who had not had polio.”

His test was a success, as were those conducted in 1954 on “one million children, ages six to nine,.. .known as the Polio Pioneers.” Salk refused to patent the vaccine or accept money for it, “preferring it [to] be distributed as widely as possible.” In 1963, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.^[2]

8 Garrett Morgan

Among other devices, Garrett Morgan (1877–1963), the son of former slaves, not only invented the “three-way traffic signal” but also a fireproof “safety hood.” According to an article on the America Comes Alive website, Morgan was aware that firefighters could fight fires inside buildings only until they were nearly overcome by smoke. After that, they would have to go outside for fresh air, unable to continue their fight against the fire until they recovered.

In a fire, Morgan knew that breathable air was close to the floor since air warmed by the fire would rise. He reasoned that if he could find a way to draw this air into a “breathing mask” worn by a firefighter, the firefighter could remain inside the burning building longer. As the website article explains, “the safety hood he created had two tubes. One sent fresher air from the floor level up into the breathing mask. The second used a valve to prevent the exhaled air from being inhaled again.”

In 1914. aided by investors, Morgan founded the National Safety Device Company to make and sell the fire safety hoods. A gold medal awarded at the Second International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation boosted sales, with New York City’s fire department and others purchasing the device. The hoods proved safe to use during a subway fire rescue.

In 1916, a much more impressive test of the hoods occurred involving the inventor himself and his brother. Cleveland Waterworks laborers were working in a tunnel when an explosion occurred, trapping some and killing others. Two attempts to rescue them failed when overcome by dense smoke and gases, four members of the initial seven-member rescue team died, and the second, eleven-member team was trapped inside the tunnel.

Morgan and his brother Frank tested the mettle of his invention when they joined the rescue effort, donning Morgan’s safety hoods. Among the dead men, the brothers located and rescued the earlier “rescue squad members who were still living.” As a result of their participation, “the Morgan brothers, aided by several volunteers, made additional multiple trips into the mine, rescuing workers one by one. Unfortunately, none of the original 11 workers could have survived as the tunnel had collapsed on them. It was several weeks before those bodies could be retrieved.”

As the website article notes, “the gas masks that were made for use in World War I were modeled after Morgan’s safety hood.”^[3]

7 Steve Gass

Steve Gass bet one of his own fingers that his invention, SawStop, would really work. A U.S. patent lawyer, inventor, and a woodworker with a Ph.D. in physics, Gass was aware that table saws cut off operators’ fingers up to ten times a day. He wanted to create a safety feature to prevent more people from undergoing this horrific, traumatic experience.

Gass’s SawStop differentiates between flesh and wood because the former conducts electricity while the latter does not. Gass’s SawStop “induces a high-frequency electrical signal on the blade of a table saw and monitors this signal for changes caused by contact between the blade and a user’s body.” When a change in the electrical signal is detected, SawStop can halt the saw blade “in 1/1000th of a second or less” by forcing “a brake into the teeth of the blade.”

Gass’s video demonstration of SawStop at work proves his invention’s effectiveness. He stuck his own finger into the saw, and he came away unscathed, his finger undamaged and intact. With neither blood nor pain to show for his trouble, Gass succeeded in demonstrating that, as the video’s narrator comments, he is, indeed, “a man who has faith in his creation.” ^[4]

6 Troy Hurtubise

AIR staff writer Alice Shirrell Kaswell reported that Troy Hurtubise (1963–2001), dressed in the Ursus Mark VI suit of armor, went head-to-head, or “mano a ursus,” with a reluctant 585-kilogram (1,290-pound) adult Kodiak bear. The predator (the bear, not Hurtubise) was leery of his adversary because “Troy Hurtubise looked so scary in his suit.” Only after ten minutes did the Kodiak bear approach him, Kaswell says, while a 157-kilogram (346-pound) grizzly showed no inclination whatsoever to fight the inventor.

When the Kodiak bear finally mustered enough courage to come after Hurtubise, and he “could smell [the animal’s] breath through [his] helmet,” the inventor of the virtually indestructible body shell admitted that he felt terrified and his heart began pounding. The bear’s trainer intervened, refusing to allow a fight between the inventor and the Kodiak bear.

However, the trainer did let Hurtubise enter the grizzly bear’s cage, confident, Hurtubise said, “that even if he took me down, she wouldn’t be able to penetrate the suit, even if she tried all day.” The grizzly was too scared to do anything more but stand “on his hind legs and [bare his] bicuspids.” Since Hurtubise had invented his suit “specifically for grizzly bears, and not Kodiaks, a behemoth subspecies,” he felt vindicated.

An episode of the American TV series Extra, demonstrating the near-invincibility of his suit, made of titanium plastic, rubber, and chain mail, is certainly impressive. Looking something like an oversize robot in his armor, Hurtubise is struck repeatedly in the head with a large stick until it breaks against his helmet.

The results of some of the challenges of his suit were equally impressive. The blast of a 12-gauge shotgun bounces harmlessly off his midriff. A three-hundred-pound log attached to chains and “launched dead center at his chest” merely knocks him down. A three-ton truck traveling at thirty miles per hour runs into him and knocks him down, causing him to roll over the ground. Finally, he throws himself down a ravine, tumbling to the bottom without a scratch.

It seemed doubtful that a grizzly could have put the preservationist to any more of a test than those he’d already passed with flying colors.^[5]

5 George Stephenson

On May 25, 1812, a massive explosion occurred inside the Low Main seam at the Felling Colliery between Gateshead and Jarrow in County Durham, UK, when an “ignition of fire-damp” triggered a coal dust explosion so devastating that it “was heard up to 4 miles away.” Ninety-two lives were lost. As a result, George Stephenson (1781–1848), a mechanic who had worked as a firefighter and a brakeman, started experimenting with a safety lamp that could employ a naked flame without igniting an explosion.

The result was his Gordie Lamp. Based on the containment of “burnt air above the flame, and [the permitting of] the firedamp to come in below in a small quantity to be burnt as it came in,” the lamp proved successful. This was especially true after a flaw (“glass breakage”) was overcome when safety glass was later invented.

As his biography reveals, George Stephenson, the inventor himself, in the company of two witnesses, Nicholas Wood and John Moodie, descended into the Killingworth mine shaft, carrying Stephenson’s lamp “to one of the galleries.” These structures were built to contain and isolate highly explosive carbureted hydrogen, so it would not spread into other areas of the mine. There, he found, hissing gas was issuing into the gallery from a fissure in the roof. Despite the presence of the dense gas, the lamp had not caused an explosion.

To test the lamp further, the gas was “collected” inside a “partition” so that it would be even more “liable to ignition.” Both Wood and Moodie, judging the demonstration to be extremely dangerous, retreated to safety, where they watched Stephenson advance, his lamp lit, to “within a few inches of the fissure,” where the current of gas extinguished the lamp’s flame “without exploding the foul air which surrounded the lamp.”

Stephenson had proved, beyond a doubt, that he had invented a safety lamp that was, indeed, safe to use, even in a mine shaft polluted with flammable gas.^[6]

4 Sir Humphry Davy

Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1828) invented several products, including a safety lamp, but he personally tested an early anesthetic procedure that he recommended. As an article on The Public Domain Review website explains, “the young English chemist and inventor and future president of the Royal Society began a very radical bout of self-experimentation to determine the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide, more commonly known as ‘Laughing Gas.’”

His assistant, Dr. Kinglake, and Davy collected gas from heated ammonium nitrate crystals in “a green oiled-silk bag.” After passing the bag through steam to remove impurities, Davy inhaled the purified gas through a mouthpiece. He seemed delighted by the results, describing the effects of the gas as exciting “giddiness, flushed cheeks, intense pleasure,” and, in the inventor’s own words, “sublime emotion connected with highly vivid ideas.”

He so enjoyed the experiment that he repeated it numerous times, even going as far as constructing what he called an “air-tight breathing box’” in which he would sit for hours inhaling enormous quantities of gas, having even more intense experiences. One of these sessions nearly cost him his life, but the danger associated with breathing the gas didn’t prevent him from sharing it with such friends as the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. The poets, likewise, recorded their experiences, which Davy collected, along with his own, and published in 1800 as Researches, Chemical and Philosophical.

In 1800, Davy recognized the gas’s “analgesic properties, named it nitrous oxide,” and, despite his near-death from having abused the gas, recommended its medical use to relieve the pain of surgery.^[7]

3 Richard Davis

A Detroit mugging led Richard Davis to invent a new “concealable lightweight body armor.” At the time, only flack jackets were available, and criminals could tell, from the bulky appearance of the jackets, that a police officer was wearing the protective gear. Instead of firing at the officer’s chest, the criminal would shoot the officer in the head.

After inventing his thin, lightweight, concealable, metal-free body armor, Davis demonstrated its effectiveness. First, he laid the vest on the ground and shot it with a handgun. Then, he mounted the vest on a post and shot it with a rifle. The body armor passed both tests, but Davis had a third, potentially fatal, test in mind as well.

Donning the gear, he held a handgun toward his abdomen, only inches away, and shot himself before spinning around and firing the weapon at bowling pins lined up on a table to his left. The gunshot, he said, stung “enough to make you mad” and broke the skin, but he was otherwise unharmed.

His invention’s tightly layered nylon with multiple interlaced fibers proved effective, creating “a mesh so dense it dissipates the explosive energy,” preventing the bullet from penetrating the weave. He repeated his demonstration 200 times. The first time, he said, was for science, but “the next two hundred [were] for show business.”

As Professor David Eisenbach, Columbia University historian, noted, Davis had not put his “money where [his] mouth is, but “his life where [his] mouth is.”^[8]

2 Jeremiah Raber

While Davis protected the heart (and other vital organs), Jeremiah Raber protected the family jewels. As Ben Hooper observes, Raber took “a bullet to the groin to prove [his] athletic cup’s strength.” His product, the aptly named Nutzshell groin protector, was originally designed for Ultimate Fighting Championship combatants.”

It seems that, like Davis, the Missouri inventor knew the need for publicity and, to promote his Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of his product, he was prepared to put his cup and his own good name to the test by participating in a live, filmed demonstration in which his business partner—an avid hunter—Matt Heck shot a .22-caliber rifle at his groin while Raber sported one of their products. “Don’t try this at home,” Raber warns viewers.

With Raber’s blue jeans and fly unbuttoned and Raber holding the front of the waist apart, Heck, using transparent tape, forms an “X” over the athletic cup. Then, lying on the ground, behind a tripod-mounted rifle set atop a flat stone, Heck aims at his target. Then, Raber, wearing protective goggles, a bulletproof vest, and protective headgear gives him a two-thumbs-up gesture. Finally, the crack of the rifle shot is heard, and the screen goes dark.

As filming resumes, Raber is shown, jeans halfway down his thighs, adjusting the undamaged cup made of ballistic Kevlar. The video then shows the actual shot, as a bullet flicks harmlessly off the surface of the cup, which bounces slightly upon the bullet’s impact. As might be expected, puns abound in the narrator’s account of the demonstration.^[9]

1 Nicolas Senn

As James E. Pilcher notes in his peer-reviewed September 1888 article in Annals of Surgery, “The fertile mind of Professor Senn is notable for the originality of its conceptions.” One of these conceptions was Nicolas Senn’s (1844–1908) invention of a procedure to diagnose intestinal perforation. The idea occurred to him when Senn realized that a stomach or intestine wound could be discovered using a process similar to that by which “a plumber locates a leak in a gas pipe.”

Senn hit on the idea of inflating the intestines with a harmless “gas which would escape from the intestinal wound into the peritoneal cavity,” thus making its presence known to the surgeon using “some infallible test.” As a result of several experiments, Senn determined that a rubber balloon holding from 10 to 20 liters (2 to 4 gallons) would be the most efficient and safest instrument for “blowing the gas throughout the bowels for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes.”

One test subject was Senn himself, who discovered, personally, the physical sensations associated with having the gas blown throughout his intestines. He makes careful, detailed notes concerning his perceptions: “The distention of the colon caused simply a feeling of distention along its course. But as soon as the gas escaped into the ileum, colicky pains were experienced, which increased as insufflation advanced, and only ceased after all the gas had escaped, which was the case only after an hour and a half.” The experience, he observed, was distressing. However, his experiments, both on dogs and humans, himself included, “fully demonstrated the safety of pure hydrogen gas when employed in this manner.”

The infallible test by which the location of the perforation of the intestine was made known was provided by the escape of gas through the wound, which produced bubbles. To tell whether the escaping gas was hydrogen, it was ignited, after which the gas would produce “a slight explosive report, and burn with a characteristic blue flame.” The application of a match or lit candle to the escaping gas—a sure sign of the presence of a perforation in the intestine—has the added advantage of sterilizing the wound, making the process both “diagnostic and therapeutic.”^[10]