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Elisha Graves Otis
Elisha Graves Otis didn't invent the elevator, he invented something perhaps more important-the elevator brake-which made skyscrapers a practical reality. In 1854 Otis dramatized his safety device on the floor of the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York. The platform held fast and the elevator industry was on its way. -
Macy's
Eighty-one years ago on the morning of March 6, 1929, millions of Americans opened their edition of The New York Times to find a headline that would send the business and retail world into a spin of excited chatter and speculation - “Abraham & Straus and Filene’s to Unite.” The announcement marked the beginning of the evolution of what was to become one of the largest and most influential corporations in retail history. -
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late nineteenth century and became the archetypal industrial entrepreneur. Carnegie set a model for big business and industry as an early and enthusiastic adopter of new technologies. -
John D. Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), founder of the Standard Oil Company, became one of the world’s wealthiest men and a major philanthropist. Born into modest circumstances in upstate New York, he entered the then-fledgling oil business in 1863 by investing in a Cleveland, Ohio, refinery. In 1870, he established Standard Oil. -
Alexander Graham Bell
In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone. In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company, and in the same year married Mabel Hubbard and embarked on a yearlong honeymoon in Europe. -
Joel Tiffany
Mr. Tiffany was not only a lawyer but also an inventor, and he is, probably, most widely known for his invention of the Tiffany Summer and Winter Refrigerator car; he also made, through his inventive genius, valuable improvements and inventions in machinery. -
Thomas Edison
The first great invention developed by Edison in Menlo Park was the tin foil phonograph. The word phonograph was the trade name for Edison's device, which played cylinders rather than discs. -
Christopher Sholes
Christopher Sholes invented the first practical typewriter and introduced the keyboard layout that is familiar today. As he experimented early on with different versions, Sholes realized that the levers in the type basket would jam when he arranged the keys in alphabetical order. -
F.W. Woolworth
At 20 years of age F. W. Woolworth found work in exchange for room and board at a local dry goods store, and after his employers held a successful clearance sale he saw the possibilities of a discount store. His key innovations were having the merchandise on open display instead of behind the counter, and having prices plainly marked instead of encouraging haggling. -
Gustavus Swift
Gustavus Swift invented the refrigerated railroad car in the 1880s. The railroad car was important because before the 1880s, you could not ship meat to places because it would spoil fast but the refrigerated railroad car keeps meat fresh so it can be shipped to other places. Swift set up a meat packing industry in Chicago, where animals were slaughtered and carved into slabs of beef. -
Ottmar Mergenthaler
In 1886 he introduced the linotype line casting machine, so named because it set an entire line of type at a time. Since Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type more than 400 years earlier, type had been set one character at a time by manual laborers who physically inserted raised-and-reverse metal type; but with Mergenthaler's linotype machine typesetting and casting was performed at a keyboard. -
Social Darwinism
Theory that persons, groups, and “races” are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had proposed for plants and animals in nature. Social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and William Graham Sumner in the U.S., held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” in Spencer's words. -
George Eastman
In 1888, George Eastman invented dry, transparent, and flexible, photographic film (or rolled photography film) and the Kodak cameras that could use the new film.
George Eastman was an avid photographer and became the founder of the Eastman Kodak company.