Nikola Tesla filed his first United States patent in 1886 and his last in 1928. The 112 patents he received during that span cover an extraordinary range of electrical inventions: motors, generators, lighting systems, power transmission, radio, remote control, and energy conversion. All of these patents have long since expired.…

At the height of World War II, approximately 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s top-secret codebreaking center in Buckinghamshire. Roughly 75 percent of them were women. They operated the machines that broke German and Japanese ciphers. They analyzed intercepted messages. They translated decoded intelligence. They maintained the filing systems…

In a 1988 poll of readers of the Mathematical Intelligencer, mathematicians voted it the most beautiful theorem in all of mathematics. The physicist Richard Feynman called it “the most remarkable formula in math.” The mathematician Keith Devlin wrote that “like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love,…

In the early 1920s, young women in factories across the United States painted watch dials with luminous radium paint. The paint glowed in the dark, making the watches readable at night. The work was considered glamorous. The paint was harmless, the companies assured them. The women were encouraged to lick…

The idea that a machine might think is older than computers themselves. In the 17th century, Leibniz imagined a calculus of reasoning that could settle any dispute through mechanical calculation. In the 19th century, Ada Lovelace speculated about the capabilities and limits of Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine. But the…

When President Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, he did not specify where on the Moon that landing would occur. This was not a trivial detail. The Moon’s surface is 14.6 million square miles of…

We all carry images of scientists in our heads. Newton with his long silver hair. Einstein with his wild white mane. Darwin with his enormous beard. Curie with her steady, penetrating gaze. These images are so familiar that they feel natural, as if the scientists simply looked that way. But…

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Marie Curie was fifty-six years old, a two-time Nobel laureate, and the most famous scientist in France. She had discovered polonium and radium. She had proved that radioactivity is an atomic property. She held the chair of physics at the Sorbonne,…

In May 1899, Nikola Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with a single assistant, a suitcase of notes, and a plan to build the most ambitious electrical laboratory the world had ever seen. Over the next eight months, he would generate artificial lightning bolts over 130 feet long, light electric…

Between 1943 and 1951, a small group of engineers, mathematicians, and physicists at the University of Pennsylvania built two machines that launched the computer age. The first, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), proved that electronic computation was possible. The second, EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), introduced the stored-program…