Inventors & scientists

  • Jack Horner – Paleontologist. Curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana and a professor at Montana State University, he is credited with finding more fossils, pioneering more innovative technologies and postulating more theories about dinosaur behavior than anyone else. He doesn't have a University degree, having flunked out of college seven times. He was immortalized as the renegade paleontologist Allen Grant in 'Jurassic Park'. 
  • Alexander Graham Bell: Teacher, thinker, and inventor
  • Harvey Cushing: Surgeon
  • Thomas Edison: Books on Thomas Edison and his work.
"My teachers say I'm addled . . . my father thought I was stupid, and I almost decided I must be a dunce." -Thomas Edison
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." - Thomas Edison
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." - Thomas Edison
"I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class." - Thomas Edison
  • James Clerk Maxwell
  • Michael Faraday: physics, the discoverer of electro-magnetic induction, electro-magnetic rotations, the magneto-optical effect, diamagnetism. Biography. Books on Michael Faraday and his work.
"I found that ... Faraday's methods ... begin with the whole and arrive at the parts by analysis, while the ordinary mathematical methods were founded on the principle of beginning with the parts and building up the whole by synthesis." - James Clerk Maxwell
"Faraday and Maxwell were two of the brightest people of the 19th century. Faraday was virtually uneducated, but he had an ace up his sleeve. Thomas West, who writes on dyslexia, points out that Faraday showed a full set of typical symptoms. He had terrible trouble with spelling and punctuation. His memory played tricks on him. He couldn't handle mathematics.
He had one more typical dyslexic trait: a powerful visual sense. He forged a finished image in his mind's eye, then he broke that image down into parts that people could understand. Maxwell tells us that Faraday built a mental picture of lines of force, filling space, shaping themselves into lovely arrays." - John H. Lienhard, author and voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity
"You should prefer a good scientist without literary abilities than a literate one without scientific skills." - Leonardo da Vinci, Dyslexiacenter
"He told me that his teachers reported that . . . he was mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams." - Hans Albert Einstein, on his father, Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice." - Albert Einstein
"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn" - Albert Einstein
"I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up." - Albert Einstein,
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Albert Einstein
"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year...... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry - especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly." - Albert Einstein
  • Sir Isaac Newton: scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. Biography. Books by and on Sir Isaac Newton.
  • Nicolai Tesla:  As a child seen as a dreamer with a poetic touch, as he matured Tesla added to these earlier qualities those of self-discipline and a desire for precision. Became an inventor and researcher with a vivid imagination and an intuitive way of developing scientific hypotheses. He discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. Biography Books of and on Nicolai Tesla.
"Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way." - Nicolai Tesla
  • The Wright Brothers
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Henry Ford
  • Galileo
  • Steven Hawking: Professor and writer of physics. Biography  Books of Steven Hawking such as: A Brief History of Time, Black Holes, Baby Universes.
  • Louis Pasteur
  • Tom Francis (AIDS researcher)
  • Simon Clement, British scientist analyzed carbon compound found in the meteorite from Mars.
  • John Robert Skoyles: Brain Researcher
  • Eli Whitney: inventor “cotton gin”
  • Werner Von Braun
  • Baruj Benacerraf: MD (winner of the Nobel prize in Physiology)  
  • Allen Grant