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Jethro Tull
Jethro Tull was an agricultural pioneer who invented the seed drill(Seen in picture). Farmers typically planted crop seeds by carrying the seeds in a bag and walking up and down the field while randomly throwing the seeds by hand. Tull thought this method was inefficient. In 1701, Tull developed a horse-drawn mechanical seed drill. The drill planted the seeds at regular intervals, at a consistent depth, and in a straight line. Tull's drilling method improved farming. -
Thomas Newcomen
Thomas Newcomen was an inventor who created the first practical steam engine for pumping water, His first working engine was installed at a coalmine at Dudley Castle in Staffordshire in 1712. Newcomen engines were very expensive but were nevertheless very successful. By the time Newcomen died on 5 August 1729 there were at least one hundred of his engines in Britain and across Europe. -
John Kay
John Kay was the inventor of the flying shuttle, which was a key contribution to the Industrial Revolution. Before the invention of the Flying Shuttle, weavers had to pass the shuttle through the warp threads by hand. Kay's invention put the shuttle on wheels and controlled it with a driver. The Flying Shuttle was able to do the work of two people even more quickly. -
James Watt
James Watt was an inventor and mechanical engineer whose Watt steam engine, an improvement of the Newcomen steam engine. It was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. He designed a separate condensing chamber for the steam engine that prevented enormous losses of steam. His first patent in 1769 covered this device and other improvements on Newcomen's engine. -
Richard Arkwright
Richard Arkwright was a barber & wig maker in Bolton around 1750 where he learnt that he could make a lot of money if he could invent a machine to spin cotton fibre into yarn, or thread, quickly and easily.By the late 1760's he had a workable machine that could spin four strands of cotton yarn at the same time. Arkwright paid for a patent in 1769 to stop others copying his invention. It was one of many similar machines powered by waterwheels, so they were called Water Frames. -
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a political economist and philosopher. He has became famous by his book called The Weatlth of Nations in 1776. The Wealth of Nations has become so influential since it did so much to create the subject of political economy and develop it into an autonomous systematic discipline. Smith has been blamed for relying too much on the ideas of great thinker Montesquieu. The Wealth of Nations remains the most important book on the subject of political ecomomy until this present day. -
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney was an inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution. He also pushed the “interchangeable parts” mode of production. Whitney worked to create a machine that was able to quickly and efficiently clean the cotton using a system of hooks, wires and a rotating brush. With the device producing more cotton in an hour than what could be produced by multiple workers in a day the reaction was immediate. -
Robert Fulton
Robert Fulton was an engineer and inventor who developed a commercially successful steamboat called Clermont. The Clermont ushered in a new era in the history of transportation. The Clermont was not the first steamboat to be built, but it was the first to become a practical, financial, and commercially.Fulton also made many important contributions to the development of naval warfare, the submarine, the technology of mine warfare, the design and construction of the first steam-powered warship. -
George Stephenson
George Stephenson was a civil engineer and mechanical engineer who built the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which opened in 1830. -
John Wesley
John Wesley was an inventor and industrialist who discovered the process for making celluloid, the first practical artificial plastic. WHile in business with his brothers he expiremented and found that a practical plastic material could be made by mixing nitrocellulose, camphor and alcohol and then pressing the mixture in a heated mold. In 1872 they moved their Celluloid Company from Albany to Newark, N.J., where they built up what came to be the premier celluloid company in the world.
