The global map
Innovation has always travelled.
Every record in the archive is placed. Select a region, then narrow by country, era, field, gender or evidence level, and read what the record holds for that corner of the world.
Regions
Region counts reflect only what is documented here. An empty region means the archive has not yet researched it — not that there is nothing to find.
Norbert Rillieux
Engineer who made industrial evaporation efficient
Explore profileElijah McCoy
Mechanical engineer of automatic machine lubrication
Explore profileLewis Howard Latimer
Draftsman and electrical pioneer who made light bulbs last
Explore profileJan Ernst Matzeliger
Inventor of the automatic shoe-lasting machine
Explore profileGranville T. Woods
Electrical engineer of railway communication
Explore profileSarah E. Goode
Among the first Black women to receive a US patent
Explore profileSarah Boone
Dressmaker who redesigned the ironing board
Explore profileAlexander Miles
Patented automatic elevator doors
Explore profileGeorge Washington Carver
Agricultural scientist of soil restoration
Explore profileGarrett A. Morgan
Inventor of the three-position traffic signal and safety hood
Explore profileMadam C. J. Walker
Built a manufacturing and distribution system from nothing
Explore profileDaniel Hale Williams
Early successful pericardial surgery; founder of Provident Hospital
Explore profileAlice Augusta Ball
Chemist who made the first effective leprosy treatment injectable
Explore profileCharles R. Drew
Built the science and logistics of blood banking
Explore profilePercy Lavon Julian
Synthetic chemist who made steroid medicines affordable
Explore profileFrederick McKinley Jones
Invented practical mobile refrigeration
Explore profileKatherine Johnson
Computed the trajectories that put Americans in orbit
Explore profileJames E. West
Co-inventor of the electret microphone
Explore profileGeorge R. Carruthers
Built the ultraviolet camera that went to the Moon
Explore profileMarie Van Brittan Brown
Patented the first home video security system
Explore profilePatricia E. Bath
Ophthalmologist who invented laser cataract surgery apparatus
Explore profileValerie L. Thomas
NASA scientist who patented the illusion transmitter
Explore profileGladys West
Mathematician behind the geodetic Earth model used by GPS
Explore profileLonnie G. Johnson
Nuclear engineer, Galileo mission veteran, inventor of the Super Soaker
Explore profileMark E. Dean
Co-architect of the IBM PC and the ISA bus
Explore profileShirley Ann Jackson
Theoretical physicist in condensed matter and telecommunications research
Explore profileMarian Croak
Engineer of voice over IP and text-to-donate
Explore profileThomas O. Mensah
Chemical engineer in fibre-optic manufacturing and nanotechnology
Explore profileManley West
Co-developed Canasol, a glaucoma treatment derived from cannabis
Explore profileAndré Rebouças
Brazilian military engineer and abolitionist
Explore profileArthur Zang
Created the CardioPad, a tablet-based cardiac diagnostic device
Explore profileHadiyah-Nicole Green
Physicist developing laser-activated nanoparticle cancer therapy
Explore profileOnesimus
Carried West African inoculation practice into colonial Boston
Explore profileBenjamin Banneker
Self-taught astronomer and almanac author
Explore profileThomas L. Jennings
First African American known to hold a United States patent
Explore profileHenry Blair
Farmer who patented seed and cotton planters in the 1830s
Explore profileRebecca Lee Crumpler
First African American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States
Explore profileErnest Everett Just
Cell biologist who argued that life happens at the cell surface
Explore profileLloyd Augustus Hall
Food chemist who made curing and sterilisation reliable
Explore profileVivien Thomas
Surgical technician who developed the blue baby operation
Explore profileJane Cooke Wright
Oncologist who moved chemotherapy from last resort to protocol
Explore profileMarie Maynard Daly
First African American woman to earn a chemistry doctorate in the United States
Explore profileOtis Frank Boykin
Electronics inventor of precision wire resistors
Explore profileDavid Harold Blackwell
Statistician whose theorems underpin modern decision theory
Explore profileDorothy Vaughan
NACA's first Black supervisor, who taught her unit to program
Explore profileMary Winston Jackson
NASA's first Black female engineer
Explore profileAnnie Easley
Rocket scientist and programmer of the Centaur upper stage
Explore profileBessie Blount Griffin
Physical therapist who built a feeding device for amputee veterans
Explore profileAlexa Irene Canady
First Black woman neurosurgeon in the United States
Explore profileMae Carol Jemison
Physician, engineer and the first Black woman in space
Explore profileAnderson Ruffin Abbott
First Black Canadian-born licensed physician
Explore profileTeodoro Sampaio
Brazilian engineer, geographer and historian born to an enslaved mother
Explore profileArlie Petters
Mathematical physicist of gravitational lensing
Explore profileJohn Edmonstone
Taxidermist who trained Charles Darwin in specimen preservation
Explore profileMaggie Aderin-Pocock
Space scientist and instrument engineer
Explore profileWangari Maathai
Biologist who turned reforestation into a national method
Explore profileCheikh Anta Diop
Physicist who built Africa's radiocarbon dating laboratory
Explore profileTebello Nyokong
Chemist developing light-activated cancer therapy
Explore profileSegenet Kelemu
Molecular plant pathologist working on crop resilience and insect science
Explore profileFrancisca Nneka Okeke
Geophysicist of the equatorial ionosphere
Explore profileKwabena Boahen
Neuromorphic engineer building circuits that compute like neurons
Explore profileVictor B. Lawrence
Signal-processing engineer behind high-speed data over ordinary lines
Explore profileWilliam Kamkwamba
Built a working wind turbine from salvage at fourteen
Explore profileCardinal Warde
Optical-computing researcher and builder of Caribbean science capacity
Explore profileThe Ishango Bone
A baboon fibula marked with three organised columns of tally notches, excavated by Jean de Heinzelin at Ishango on Lake Edward.
Iron production at Meroë
Large-scale iron smelting, evidenced by slag mounds and excavated furnace bases across the Meroitic capital.
The monolithic stelae of Aksum
Granite stelae up to about 24 metres long, carved to represent multi-storey buildings with false doors and windows, and erected over rock-cut tomb chambers.
Tetracycline in the bones of ancient Nubia
Bone from ancient Nubian remains was found to contain tetracycline — the antibiotic itself, deposited in the skeleton in quantities that indicate sustained dietary exposure.
Great Zimbabwe's dry-stone architecture
Coursed dry-stone granite walls up to 11 metres high and 5 metres thick, laid without mortar, enclosing a capital of a major trading state.
The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela
Eleven churches cut downward out of solid rock — walls, roofs, columns, windows and drainage carved from the living stone rather than constructed on it.
Sahelian mud-brick engineering at Djenné
Sun-dried ferey bricks and banco render over a timber armature of protruding palm beams, producing walls that regulate interior temperature and can be resurfaced every year.
The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu
Hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts, including works on astronomy and medicine, held in family and institutional libraries.
The walls and earthworks of Benin City
A vast network of banks and ditches enclosing the city and hundreds of surrounding communities — one of the largest earthwork systems in the world.
Dry scouring of clothes
A process for cleaning garments without immersion in water — the ancestor of dry cleaning — patented by a New York tailor.
Multiple-effect evaporator
A sealed series of vacuum pans in which the vapour boiled off in one pan supplies the heat for the next, at successively lower pressures.
Automatic engine lubricator
A cup that fed oil steadily to the engine's moving parts using the engine's own steam pressure, while it ran.
Caesarean section in Bunyoro-Kitara
A European medical student, Robert Felkin, watched a caesarean performed in Bunyoro in which both mother and child survived, and published a detailed account of the procedure.
Process for manufacturing carbon filaments
A method of encasing the filament blank in a cardboard envelope during carbonisation so it heats evenly and holds its shape.
Automatic shoe-lasting machine
A machine that held the last, pleated the leather over it, positioned the sole and drove the nails.
Cabinet bed
A roll-top desk with storage that unfolded into a full bed, and folded back with the bedding stowed inside.
Automatic elevator door mechanism
A mechanism that opened and closed the shaft door automatically in step with the cage's position.
Railway induction telegraph
A system that sent telegraph signals between a moving train and the track-side wires by electromagnetic induction, without physical contact.
Improved ironing board
A narrow, curved, padded and reversible board mounted on collapsible supports.
High-temperature preheated furnaces of the Haya
Haya smiths built furnaces that preheated the air blast by drawing it through tuyères set inside the burning charcoal, reaching very high temperatures.
Safety hood (breathing device)
A hood with long intake tubes hanging near the floor, where smoke is thinner, plus a moist absorbent lining.
The Ball Method for chaulmoogra oil
A chemical process isolating the ethyl esters of chaulmoogra oil's fatty acids, producing an injectable, water-miscible preparation.
Three-position traffic signal
A T-shaped signal with a third, intermediate all-stop position that halted traffic in every direction before the change.
Sterilised spices and reliable curing salts
A vacuum chamber that drew ethylene oxide through spices to sterilise them cold, and a flash-drying process that combined curing salts into a single crystal so they acted in the right order.
Banked blood and plasma distribution
Systematic methods for separating, preserving, testing and distributing plasma at scale, set out in Drew's doctoral thesis and applied in Blood for Britain.
The blue baby operation
A shunt joining a systemic artery to the pulmonary artery, restoring blood flow to the lungs — developed in the laboratory by Vivien Thomas after Helen Taussig identified the physiological problem.
Truck-mounted mechanical refrigeration
A compact, shock-resistant, removable refrigeration unit designed to be mounted on a truck body.
The West Area computers become programmers
Dorothy Vaughan taught herself FORTRAN and machine operation, then taught her staff, converting a pool of hand calculators into the programming staff of the new Analysis and Computation Division.
The precision wire resistor
A wire-wound resistance element designed so its value held under thermal and mechanical stress, and could be manufactured cheaply and consistently.
Chemotherapy against solid tumours
Systematic patient trials of chemotherapeutic agents, including methotrexate, against solid tumours — and a method of testing candidate drugs on tissue taken from the patient's own tumour before treating them.
Foil-electret microphone
A polymer film holding a permanent electrostatic charge, removing the need for an external bias voltage.
Software for the Centaur upper stage
Easley developed and analysed code supporting Centaur's design and performance analysis, and later applied the same computational approach to energy-conversion and battery-storage studies.
Closed-circuit home security system
A motorised camera scanning a set of peepholes, feeding a bedroom monitor, with two-way voice, remote door release and a panic alarm.
Far-ultraviolet camera/spectrograph
An electrographic camera converting far-UV photons into electrons recorded directly on film.
The Green Belt seedling method
Pay rural women a small sum per seedling that survives, and let them run the nurseries. Restoration becomes household income and a claim on the land.
Geodetic Earth modelling for satellite positioning
Programming and refinement of geodetic computations from satellite altimetry data to model the geoid.
Illusion transmitter
A pair of concave mirrors that produce a real optical image appearing to occupy space in front of the display, transmissible to a remote location.
The ISA bus and the open PC architecture
A standard internal expansion bus letting third parties build cards — graphics, sound, networking, storage — that any PC could accept.
Pressurised water gun (Super Soaker)
A hand-pumped pressurised reservoir that releases a continuous high-volume stream on the trigger.
Laserphaco Probe for cataract surgery
A probe combining a laser fibre with irrigation and aspiration channels to vaporise and flush out the clouded lens.
Voice over Internet Protocol systems
A large portfolio of patented methods for delivering reliable voice and multimedia over IP networks.
A windmill built from salvage
A wind turbine assembled from a bicycle frame and dynamo, a tractor cooling fan, PVC pipe blades and blue-gum poles, driven by a library physics textbook he could only partly read in English.
Light-activated cancer therapy with phthalocyanines
Phthalocyanine dyes that accumulate in tumour tissue and are inert until illuminated at a specific wavelength, at which point they generate reactive oxygen that kills the cell.
M-PESA mobile money
A system that stores and transfers value as SMS-based credit through a network of ordinary shopkeepers acting as cash-in and cash-out agents — banking without banks or smartphones.
Ushahidi crisis mapping
An open-source platform that collects reports by SMS, email and web and places them on a map in near real time — crowdsourced situational awareness.
CardioPad tele-cardiology tablet
A touchscreen tablet with ECG electrodes that records a heart trace locally and transmits it over the mobile network for specialist reading.
Neurogrid neuromorphic system
A mixed analogue-digital multichip system in which silicon transistors operating in their analogue regime emulate the physics of neurons and synapses directly, rather than computing equations about them.