Inventors and Inventions

  • Jethro Tull

    Jethro Tull
    was an English agriculturist from Berkshire who helped to bring the British Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century; invented the horse-drawn seed drill in 1700 (dug up the soil, loosening it for planting while also pulling up unwanted weed roots)
  • Abraham Darby

    Abraham Darby
    was a British ironmaster who was the first to successfully smelt iron ore with coke and ended up finding the Bristol Iron Company
  • Thomas Newcomen

    Thomas Newcomen
    was an English inventor that invented the first practical fuel burning machine (a device which is designed to use different kinds of gases as fuel)
  • John Kay

    John Kay
    was an English inventor and made a key contribution to the Industrial Revolution; invented flying shuttle (helped weavers weave fabric quicker)
  • Adam Smith

    Adam Smith
    was a Scottish economist, philosopher, pioneer of political economy, and an impactful person during the Scottish Enlightenment; created concept of gross domestic product (GDP)
  • Samuel Crompton

    Samuel Crompton
    was an English inventor and pioneer of the spinning industry that invented the spinning mule (a machine used to spin cotton)
  • Henry Cort

    Henry Cort
    was an English ironmaster that created the puddling process, converting pig iron into wrought iron
  • Robert Owen

    Robert Owen
    Welsh manufacturer that ended up being a reformer, and is one of the most influential early 19th-century advocates of utopian socialism; first to use the American Sea Island Cotton which was a fine, long fiber
  • Robert Fulton

    Robert Fulton
    was an American engineer and inventor who created the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the Clermont
  • David Ricardo

    David Ricardo
    was a British political economist and said to be one of the most influential people of the classical economists who came up with the theory on wages and profit (wages depended on the relative amounts of capital available for the payment of workers)
  • Karl Marx

    Karl Marx
    was a German philosopher, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary that developed the ideas of socialism and communism (a political and economic theory of social organization)
  • Cyrus Field

    Cyrus Field
    was an American businessman and financier who invented the Atlantic Telegraph Company, a company formed on to exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean.