IR Inventors/Inventions/Contributions

  • Abraham Darby

    Abraham Darby

    British ironmaster who first successfully smelted iron ore with coke.
  • Adam Smith

    Adam Smith

    The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, it lays the psychological foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was later to be built.
  • Richard Arkwright

    Richard Arkwright

    Arkwright's water frame (so-called because it operated by waterpower) produced a cotton yarn suitable for warp.
  • Jeremy Bentham

    Jeremy Bentham

    anonymously published A Fragment on Government. This slim volume is an offshoot of a larger critique of Blackstone that was not published until the twentieth century, and is now known as A Comment on the Commentaries
  • Samuel Crompton

    Samuel Crompton

    mule-jenny, a machine which spun yarn suitable for use in the manufacture of muslin. It was known as the muslin wheel or the Hall i' th' Woodwheel, from the name of the house in which he and his family now lived.
  • John Wesley

    John Wesley

    Twenty-five Articles of Religion
  • Edmund Cartwright

    Edmund Cartwright

    designed his first power loom in 1784 and patented it in 1785, but it proved to be valueless. In 1789, he patented another loom which served as the model for later inventors to work upon.
  • Nicolas LeBlanc

    Nicolas LeBlanc

    manufacturing sodium carbonate
  • Eli Whitney

    Eli Whitney

    patented the cotton gin, a machine that revolutionized the production of cotton by greatly speeding up the process of removing seeds from cotton fiber.
  • Alessandro Volta

    Alessandro Volta

    demonstration of his battery's generation of electric current before Napoleon
  • George Stephenson

    George Stephenson

    constructed his first locomotive, 'Blucher', for hauling coal at Killingworth Colliery near Newcastle. In 1815, he invented a safety lamp for use in coalmines, nicknamed the 'Geordie'. In 1821, Stephenson was appointed engineer for the construction of the Stockton and Darlington railway.
  • Cyrus Field

    Cyrus Field

    an American businessman and financier who led the Atlantic Telegraph Company, the company that successfully laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.