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Other than his political career, Charles Townshend is most famous for inventing the "Four Field System" of crop rotation. He divided his field into four sections, in which he planted wheat, barley, turnips, and clover, in that order. Each year, the order of the crops would be rotated clockwise. -
James Hargreaves was a weaver from Lancashire in north-west England, who invented the 'spinning jenny', which was the earliest of a succession of inventions that enabled the industrialization of cotton spinning. -
Water frame, in textile manufacture, a spinning machine powered by water that produced a cotton yarn suitable for warp (lengthwise threads). Richard Arkwright, it represented an improvement on James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, which produced weaker thread suitable only for weft (filling yarn). -
The steam engine developed by the Scotsman James Watt was much more efficient in terms of power and fuel consumption than earlier models, and it significantly increased the possible uses for this key invention of the Industrial Revolution. -
U.S.-born inventor 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's electric battery was a simple and reliable source of electric current, which allowed scientists to study electricity better than they could with previous sources, such as the Leyden jar, and allowed the development of new technology powered by electricity. -
French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a machine that was then seen as one of the most important technological advancements in history: the Jacquard Loom which simplified the way in which complex textiles such as damask were woven. The mechanism involved the use of thousands of punch cards laced together. -
Known as the 'Father of the Railways', George Stephenson was a pioneering engineer and inventor who rose from a humble background to play the key role in the development and building of Britain's railways. His most famous invention was the locomotive engine called the 'Rocket'. -
Samuel F.B. Morse was both an accomplished inventor and a painter. He developed an electric telegraph (1832–35) and then codeveloped the Morse Code (1838). During this time he also painted some of the finest portraits ever done by an American artist. -
Louis Daguerre was a french painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype.The previous process was of poor quality and required about eight hours’ exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed required only 20 to 30 minutes. -
English inventor Henry Bessemer is known for his invention of the Bessemer Process, the most successful steelmaking technique from its introduction due to its relative low cost and its efficiency in eliminating impurities. -
Alexander Graham Bell is credited with being the inventor of the telephone since his patent and demonstrations for an apparatus designed for “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically… causing electrical undulations” were successful. -
Edison built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours. -
Gottlieb Daimler, with the help of Wilhelm Maybach, developed the forerunner of the modern gas engine by advancing Nicolaus Otto's oil-powered design. Adapting the engine to a stagecoach, Daimler successfully designed the world's first four-wheeled automobile. -
Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal