Shouldn't we really give the credit to the founder of the assembly line of the Venetian Arsenal in the 16th century? 16 thousand people could build, fit and launch one gallery a day using standardized parts.General Zod wrote:More of an engineer than a scientist, but you have to credit Henry Ford for the refinement of the assembly line concept. Without that we'd have a hard time manufacturing anything on a large scale.
Scientists: Utilitarian Hall of Fame
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Re: Scientists: Utilitarian Hall of Fame
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General Zod
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Re: Scientists: Utilitarian Hall of Fame
They might have come up with the basic idea, but I'm not sure that really fits considering the other mentions in this thread.Tolya wrote:Shouldn't we really give the credit to the founder of the assembly line of the Venetian Arsenal in the 16th century? 16 thousand people could build, fit and launch one gallery a day using standardized parts.General Zod wrote:More of an engineer than a scientist, but you have to credit Henry Ford for the refinement of the assembly line concept. Without that we'd have a hard time manufacturing anything on a large scale.
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Re: Scientists: Utilitarian Hall of Fame
mmm - they developed it, but it was never taken further at the time, so may not count.
I agree with DarthWong re water treatment - clean water has added as much to life expectancy as the entire development of modern medicine.
in keeping with the theme of utilising advances: Henry Bessemer claims the credit for mass cheap production of steel, leading to the other half of the industrial revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process
Brunel did pretty well in a number of fields.
Finally, as a wild card, The Cadbury family for bringing chocolate and decent living standards to the British masses.
I agree with DarthWong re water treatment - clean water has added as much to life expectancy as the entire development of modern medicine.
in keeping with the theme of utilising advances: Henry Bessemer claims the credit for mass cheap production of steel, leading to the other half of the industrial revolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process
Brunel did pretty well in a number of fields.
Finally, as a wild card, The Cadbury family for bringing chocolate and decent living standards to the British masses.
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Winston Blake
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Re: Scientists: Utilitarian Hall of Fame
And now for something completely different: the development of public key cryptography made cheap, widespread secure communications possible. Without it, commercial use of the internet (and of telecommunications in general) would not have taken off in the 90s.
The fundamentals were invented by Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Previously, the consensus opinion of centuries of cryptography was that it was impossible to share a secret (message) without already sharing a secret (key). The U.S. government spent vast amounts of money on securely transporting and distributing actual physical media, holding cryptographic keys, just to maintain everyday operations.
The D-H-M team did the 'impossible', just in time for the computer revolution.
The fundamentals were invented by Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Previously, the consensus opinion of centuries of cryptography was that it was impossible to share a secret (message) without already sharing a secret (key). The U.S. government spent vast amounts of money on securely transporting and distributing actual physical media, holding cryptographic keys, just to maintain everyday operations.
The D-H-M team did the 'impossible', just in time for the computer revolution.
Robert Gilruth to Max Faget on the Apollo program: “Max, we’re going to go back there one day, and when we do, they’re going to find out how tough it is.”
Re: Scientists: Utilitarian Hall of Fame
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen in the air on an industrial scale. It was a brilliant combination of science and engineering, and it's had quite an impact on the world: without the fertilizer produced with the Haber-Bosch process, billions of people would starve.