On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright made the first flight on a craft that was engine-powered and heavier-than-air. He piloted the craft by lying in the middle of the lower wing. The craft flew 120 feet (37 meters) in 12 seconds. The brothers made three more flights that day, with Wilbur Wright completing the...

He was the guiding force behind the creation and development of the Standard Oil Company, which grew to dominate the oil industry and became one of the first big trusts in the United States. Rockefeller also was one of the first major philanthropists in the U.S., establishing several important foundations and donating a total of $540 million to charitable purposes.

In 1859, Rockefeller formed a partnership and in that same year the first oil well was drilled at Titusville in western Pennsylvania, giving rise to the petroleum industry. Cleveland soon became a major refining center of the booming new industry, and in 1863 Rockefeller and Clark entered the oil business as refiners. He built and operated an oil refinery under the company name of Andrews, Clark & Co.

In the 1870s, two inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically (the telephone). But Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first.

On March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted Bell a patent for a communication device for "transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically.

" Bell's telephone grew out of improvements he made to the telegraph. He had invented the "harmonic telegraph" which could send more than one message at a time over a single telegraph wire. Bell reasoned that it would be possible to pick up and transmit the sound of the human voice using an adaptation of his "harmonic telegraph." In 1875, along with his assistant Thomas A.

Watson, Bell constructed instruments that transmitted recognizable voice-like sounds. Bell continued his experiments in communication. He invented the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light, which was a precursor of fiber-optics. He also invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. Bell was granted 18 patents in his name, and 12 he shared with collaborators.

Helu is a Mexican entrepreneur and businessman involved in a varied group of companies that include telecommunications, retail, banking and insurance, technology, and auto parts manufacturing businesses. He is the wealthiest Mexican man, the richest Latin American, and one of the top ten richest men in the world.

The financial success that Slim Helu has achieved has been from finding undervalued companies and making them profitable. Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) was acquired during a privatization period in 1990 of the Mexican government. Carlos underwent on to improve phone services in Mexico with the company offering local and long distance calls, mobile phone services, Internet services, and a telephone directory.

Even though he has admitted to having very poor computer skills, he sees the Internet and technology as a major growth area in his group of businesses. He owns the largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Mexico and had one of the largest in the United States of America with his acquisition of Prodigy. Slim also owns the major computer retailer CompUSA, with more than 200 retail stores throughout the USA and Puerto Rico.

In June of 2007 it was reported that the wealth of Carlos Slim Helu increased to an estimated $67.8 billion, making him the richest man in the world. This puts Carlos Slim ahead of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates

James Watt was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer, who was renowned for improving the steam engines, invented by the English engineers which were used at the time to pump water from mines. The centrifugal or flyball governor, which he invented in 1788, and which automatically regulated the speed of an engine, is of particular interest today.

It embodies the feedback principle of a servomechanism, linking output to input, which is the basic concept of automation. Most notable was Watt's 1769 patent for a separate condenser connected to a cylinder by a valve. Unlike any other, Watt's design had a condenser that could be cool while the cylinder was hot because of which engine soon became the dominant design for all modern steam engines and helped bring about the Industrial Revolution.

A unit of power called the Watt was named after James Watt. The Watt symbol is W, and it is equal to 1/746 of a horsepower, or one Volt times one Amp.

Andreas Pavel is a German inventor who is the 'father' of the portable personal stereo cassette player, better known as the Walkman Pavel invented his device in 1972, and over the next few years, tried to interest companies like Grundig, Philips, and Yamaha in manufacturing it. In 1977, Pavel filed a patent in Italy on the device, followed by patents in the United States, Germany, England, and Japan.

Pavel initially called it the "stereobelt." Now 59, this man turns out to have invented - and patented - what became the Sony Walkman.The first time he tested his portable personal cassette player and headphones was in the woods in St. Moritz, Switzerland.In 2003 Pavel and Sony settled for a payment said to be "in the low eight figures," The Walkman sold for about $200 ($450 today) when it debuted and Sony's sold zillions of them and probably made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits on the device.

The IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer was designed in the portholed attic of Watson Lab at Columbia University 1948 and 1954 as the Personal Automatic Computer (PAC) and announced by IBM as the 610 Auto-Point in 1957¹.

The IBM 610 was the first personal computer, in the sense that it was the first computer intended for use by one person (e.g. in an office) and controlled from a keyboard². The IBM electric typewriter printed the output at 18 characters per second. IBM 610 computer, allows the solution of complex problems by an operator whose only previous experience with computing has been the desk calculator.

The machine's command structure is designed so that the operator can at all times communicate with the computer by a series of short sentence-type instructions closely resembling the steps of manual arithmetic solution.

In the mid-19th century Robert Anderson, a Scottish businessman, came up with the early version of an electric vehicle that more or less resembles the carriage that was popular in his time. This car came before the invention and perfection of cars that run on gasoline and diesel.

Robert Anderson's invention is thus considered to be one of the earliest forms of automobiles. Electric vehicles had many advantages over their competitors in the early 1900s. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. The electric vehicle was the preferred choice of many because it did not require the manual effort to start.