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Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse

Moderator: Christopher Lydon
Doug Engelbart Brian Hubert Steve Wozniak Ray Kurzweil '70 Robert S. Langer Jr. SCD '74: November 27, 2001; Running Time: 01:43:30

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

"Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse" celebrates the best of American ingenuity and inventiveness. Through in-depth profiles of 35 inventors, "Inventing Modern America" tells the often-surprising stories of how every day objects and technologies were created. Each profile is illustrated with historical photographs, diagrams, and patent drawings that illuminate the inventor's life, inventive process, and creations.

The book was developed by the Lemelson-MIT Program for Invention and Innovation, whose misssion is to inspire a new generation of American scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

About the Speakers

Moderator: Christopher Lydon

Doug Engelbart

Computer visionary, inventor of the computer mouse

Brian Hubert

Inventor of the world's first universal "pick-and-place" nano-assembly machine

Steve Wozniak

Co-Founder, Apple Computer Founder, Chairman and CEO of Wheels of Zeus (wOz)

Steve Wozniak was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1985, the highest honor bestowed America's leading innovators. In 2000, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment for “single-handedly designing the first personal computer and for then redirecting his lifelong passion for mathematics and electronics toward lighting the fires of excitement for education in grade school students and their teachers.”

Wozniak founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose.

Wozniak recently published iWoz From Computer Geek to Culture Icon: How I invented the personal compter, co-founded Apple, and had fun doing it., (2006 Norton).

Ray Kurzweil '70

Chairman and CEO, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc. Author, The Singularity is Near

Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition (OCR), the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed, large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Ray Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation’s largest award in invention and innovation, and was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventor Hall of Fame. He won the Winston Gordon medal from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind for his pioneering work using technology for the benefit of blind people. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has received 12 honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has written five books and hundreds of articles. His most recent work,The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking), was published in Spring 2005.

Kurzweil received a B.S. in Computer Science and Literature, from MIT in 1970.

Robert S. Langer Jr. SCD '74

Institute Professor and Kenneth J. Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
2002 Draper Prize Award Recipient

Robert Langer has more than 500 issued or pending patents worldwide. In 2005, Langer received the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, America's top prize in medicine. In 2002, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers, from the National Academy of Engineering. Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright) and the General Motors Kettering Award for Cancer Research (2004). Langer is one of very few people ever elected to all three U.S. National Academies and the youngest in history (age 43) ever to receive this distinction.

He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.