TECHONOMISTS: THE BIG LIST
Who is a techonomist? Here’s a list to help answer that question. Humans have been innovating since they devised the first tools, which amplified their ability to manipulate and adapt to the environment. Our list doesn’t go back quite that far, but we did compile a roster of people whose inventions or new ways of looking at the world have resulted in a qualitative surge in our species’ ability to feed and clothe itself, and in freeing people up to become even more creative and inventive. The people we chose as exemplars often created new techonomic multipliers that immediately created wealth or abundance or that facilitated new ways to increase the cumulative intellectual and productive capabilities of our civilizations. Others devised ways to improve our ability to work together. As a group, they demonstrate how one techonomic breakthrough invariably leads to others. Techonomists, then, are agents of human evolution.
Past Techonomists (in chronological order):
When one traces the chronology of techonomic activities forward through history, you can begin to see the cumulative nature of human technological creativity. To stand still as a civilization is to stagnate. We stand upon the shoulders of our predecessors, just as they stood on the shoulders of theirs. Our criteria for this making list were simple: We chose individuals throughout recorded history whose work was not only significant on its own, but also created a solid foundation for those who followed.
Zhang Heng (78-139 AD) – early astronomer and inventor of the water clock
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) – Italian sculptor and engineer who designed the Duomo of Florence and was the foremost architect of the Italian Renaissance
Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) – inventor of the printing press
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) – an Italian philosopher, writer and diplomat who is considered the originator of modern political science
Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) – Polish polymath best known for proposing a heliocentric model for the universe
Gallileo Gallilei (1564-1642) – Inventor of the telescope
Antony von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) – Dutch tradesman who is considered the first microbiologist, as a result of improving the microscope
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) – inventor of the microscope
Isaac Newton (1643-1727) – originated the theory of universal gravitation and laws of motion; invented the reflector telescope
John Harrison (1693-1776) – inventor of the marine chronometer
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) – inventor, early American statesman
Adam Smith (1723-1790) – originator of modern economics
James Watt (1736-1819) – inventor of the steam engine
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) – primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, inventor, educator, agronomist, and President of the United States
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) – French chemist and biologist who first isolated and identified the elements of oxygen and hydrogen
Edward Jenner (1749-1823) – an English scientist who became known as the originator of immunology and created the small pox vaccine in 1794
Robert Fulton (1765-1815) – steam-powered ship services
Eli Whitney (1765-1825) – interchangeable parts, cotton gin
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – the British scholar was the first true demographer, who studied population growth and the effects of famine and disease
Michael Faraday (1791-1867) – pioneer of electromagnetism, inventor of the electric motor
Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) – inventor of telegraphy
Charles Goodyear (1800-1860) – devised the method to make vulcanized rubber
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) – originated the theory of evolution
I.M. Singer (1811-1875) – invented the sewing machine
Elisha Otis (1811-1861) – invented the passenger elevator
Karl Marx (1818-1883) – originator of Marxist and Communist economic theories
Edward L. Drake (1819-1880) – petroleum exploration and extraction
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) – studied methods of selective breeding
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) – developed germ theory of disease
Joseph Lister (1827-1912) – an English surgeon who was the first proponent of sterile surgery and treatment of wounds with carbolic acid and other antiseptics
James Maxwell (1831-1879) – formulated theories of electromagnetism, determined that light travels at a constant speed, and devised the first method for color photography
William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907) – an American architect who studied architecture and engineering in France alongside Gustave Eiffel, and is considered the father of the modern skyscraper
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) – the French structural engineer, best known for his namesake tower, made use of steel in new ways and revolutionized bridge design
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) – inventor of telephony
Thomas Edison (1847-1931) – developed the light bulb, direct current, phonograph, motion picture camera, holder of 1,093 patents
Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934) – Spanish physician who won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking study of the human brain and his meticulous drawings are still used for the study of neurology to this day
George Eastman (1854-1932) – consumer photography pioneer
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) – studied electromagnetism, developed alternating current
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) – innovative American educator
Max Planck (1858-1947) – German-born physicist who is credited for winning the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering of energy quanta
George Washington Carver (1864-1943) – American botanist, agronomist, sustainable agriculture pioneer
Orville and Wilbur Wright (1872,1867-1912,1948) – developers of heavier-than-air flight
Henry Ford (1863-1947) – automobile design and manufacture, perfected the assembly line method of modern mass production
Marie Curie (1867-1934) – French physicist who pioneered radioactivity; won two Nobel prizes
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) – a chemist and physicist who first discovered the nucleus of the atom
Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) – first developed radio
Thomas Watson (1874-1956) – early president of IBM
Willis Carrier (1876-1950) – inventor of modern air conditioning technology
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) – originator of landmark theories of Relativity and Gravity
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) – an early advocate of methods of contraception and founder of what eventually became Planned Parenthood
Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) – Scottish biologist credited with discovering penicillin and other antibiotics
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) – British economist whose theories about fiscal and monetary practice have influenced government intervention in the capitalist marketplace to mitigate the adverse effects of business cycles
Vladimir Zworykin (1888-1982) – Russian-born electrical engineer, devised television transmitting and receiving technologies employing cathode ray tubes
David Sarnoff (1891-1971) – Russian-born pioneer of American commercial radio and television who founded both the National Broadcasting Corporation network and the Radio Corporation of America electronics manufacturer
Georges Doriot (1899-1987) – pioneering American venture capitalist and business educator
Juan Trippe (1899-1981) – pioneer of commercial aviation who founded Pan American Airways, the first global air carrier
Stephen D. Bechtel (1900-1989) – the son of the founder of the engineering and construction company that bears his name, the younger Bechtel built many of the man-made wonders of the world including Hoover Dam, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the English Channel Tunnel
Walt Disney (1901-1966) – animation pioneer, entertainment entrepreneur
Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) – a German theoretical physicist known best for his “uncertainty principle” of quantum theory
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) – an Italian physicist who is remembered primarily for his role in developing the first nuclear reactor
Linus Pauling (1901-1994) – father of modern molecular biology
Ray Kroc (1902-1984) – using assembly line discipline, the entrepreneur who parlayed a small drive-in restaurant franchise into McDonald’s Corp., the largest and most successful fast-food operation in the world
John von Neumann (1903-1957) – originator of the theory of quantum mechanics, set theory, game theory, hydrodynamics and numerical analysis used in harnessing nuclear energy
Gregory Pincus (1903-1967) – American biologist who invented the oral contraceptive pill
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) – director of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb
Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971) – the inventor of television
Grace Hopper (1906-1992) – computer scientist and naval officer who originated the idea of software “languages” optimized for certain kinds of computing tasks
William Levitt (1907-1994) – the real estate developer credited with being the father of modern American suburbia
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) – biologist and writer who helped pioneer environmentalism
Walter Reuther (1907-1970) – the self-proclaimed socialist transformed the United Auto Workers labor union into a national political force in the mid-20th century
Masaru Ibuka (1908-1997) – Japanese engineer who was co-founder of Sony
Michael Debakey (1908-1008) – heart surgeon, educator, pioneer of heart transplantation
Peter Drucker (1909-2005) – Austrian-born writer, management theorist, social “ecologist”
Edwin Land (1909-1991) – inventor of self-developing photographic film, polarizing filters, theory of color sight
William Shockley (1910-1989) – the British-born physicist, educator, and entrepreneur co-invented the transistor, which became the basis of other “solid-state” electronic components made from semiconductors
Alan Turing (1912-1954) – British mathmetician and cryptoanalyst considered the father of computer science
Werner von Braun (1912-1977) – German rocket architect and space physicist, during World War II he was chief designer of Germany’s V-2 missile, and later the Saturn V booster rocket for the Apollo moon missions
Thomas Watson Jr. (1914-1981) – president of IBM during its ascension to dominance of the early computer industry
Paul Samuelson (1915-2009) – greatest 20th Century economist
Francis Crick (1916-2004) – British biologist who along with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) – a British science fiction writer who was trained as a radar technician and was the first to propose using satellites to relay telecommunications around the world
Sam Walton (1918-1992) – Founder of Wal-Mart
Richard Feynmann (1918-1988) – a noted American nuclear physicist and educator
John Eckert (1919-1995) – an American electrical engineer who co-invented the Eniac – the world’s first general purpose digital computer – and co-founded the first commercial computer maker, which produced the Univac
Akio Morita (1921-1999) – Japanese entrepreneur who was co-founder of Sony
Jack Kilby (1923-2005) – inventor (in parallel) of the integrated circuit
Robert Noyce (1927-1990) – inventor (in parallel) of the integrated circuit
Gary Kildall (1942-1994) – creator of CP/M, the first widely adopted computer operating system designed to take advantage of microprocessor integrated circuits
Robert Swanson (1947-1999) – co-Founder of Genentech and former venture capitalist
Present Techonomists (in alphabetical order):
The higher techonomic metabolism of today is the net effect of the growing multitude of techonomists in our midst. Techonomic advances are popping up across the entire spectrum of human endeavor, and one of the characteristics of today’s innovations is that so many of them happen in parallel. Today’s techonomists are synthesizers and combiners, creating new technologies that are greater than the sum of their components, whether it be a new drug therapy, a mobile communicator, or water purifier for the outback. This is an alphabetical list of living techonomists with long track records of accomplishment.
Paul Allen – Microsoft co-founder
Marc Andreessen – Netscape founder, Ning founder, VC
W. Brian Arthur – economist, author of The Nature of Technology
Andreas Bechtolsheim – electrical engineer and computer and networking equipment designer, co-founder of Sun and primary angel investor to Google
Tim Berners-Lee – Inventor of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that transformed the Internet from a communications tool mainly for scientists into a conduit for multimedia expression
Jeff Bezos – founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and founder of Blue Origin human spaceflight startup
Bono – musician and social activist
Stewart Brand – biologist, ecologist, author of Whole Earth Discipline
Richard Branson – Virgin empire impresario — Virgin America, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Records, Virgin Mobile
Jim Breyer – managing partner of Accel Partners
Warren Buffett – chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, primary contributor to the Gates Foundation
Ed Catmull – computer graphics pioneer and founder of Pixar
John Chambers – Cisco CEO
George Church – Harvard biotech prof
Michael Dell – founder and CEO of Dell Computer, the “Henry Ford of the PC business”
John Doerr – managing partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Thomas Dolby – musician and software entrepreneur
Freeman Dyson – Princeton physicist
Larry Ellison – founder and CEO of Oracle
Douglas Engelbart – inventor of the mouse & early graphical user interface
Marcus Feldman – Stanford biotech prof
Steven Fodor – founder of Affymetrix, the make of DNA microarrays for genetic screening and analysis
Peter Gabriel – musician and social activist
Bill Gates – co-founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Melinda Gates – co-chair of the Gates Foundation
Andy Grove – legendary Intel CEO
Stephen Hawking — theoretical physicist
Marcian “Ted” Hoff – Intel engineer who invented the Microprocessor
Leroy Hood – University of Washington genetecist
John Ive – chief designer at Apple Inc.
Irwin Jacobs – founder of Qualcomm – inventor of CDMA mobile digital communications technology
Paul Jacobs – CEO of Qualcomm – son of Irwin
Robert Jarvik – inventor of the mechanical heart and other medical devices
Steve Jobs – co-founder and CEO of Apple and former CEO of Pixar Animation Studios
Bill Joy – senior partner at KPCB focusing exclusively on greentech startup companies, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and creator of the “Berkeley UNIX” operating system.
Steve Jurvetson - managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Dean Kamen – inventor of the Segway and many other inventions
Alan Kay – legendary computer scientist
Herb Kelleher – founder and mastermind of Southwest Airlines
Ray Kurzweil – artificial intelligence maven
Jaron Lanier - computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author
John Lasseter – animator, film director and creative director at Pixar and Disney
Peter Lynch – mutual fund pioneer
Greg Maffei – Liberty Media CEO, former Microsoft CFO
John Malone – Chairman of Liberty Media, founder of TeleCommunications Inc., the first big cable TV operator
Craig McCaw – cellular phone pioneer
Roger McNamee – managing partner at Elevation Partners
Kary Mullis – Nobel laureate chemist who refined Polymerase Chain Reaction technology that is used to amplify and replicate specific DNA sequences
Nathan Myhrvold – former head of Microsoft Research, founder of Intellectual Ventures
Craig Newmark – Craigslist founder
Stanford Ovshinsky – inventor of nickel metal hydride batteries and thin-film solar energy laminate technology
Larry Page and Sergey Brin – founders of Google
Hasso Plattner – founder of SAP
Jeff Raikes – CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Arthur Rock – legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist
Burt Rutan – aeronautical engineer and pioneer of lightweight materials for aircraft
Eric Schmidt – CEO of Google, former CEO of Novell Systems, former chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems, Xerox PARC alum
Charles Schwab – discount stock brokerage pioneer
John Seely Brown – Xerox Palo Alto Research Center director
Hamilton Smith – microbiologist who won the Nobel Prize for his early use of genetics to study bacteria, and is now a pioneer in synthetic biology
Frederick Smith – founder and mastermind of Fedex
George Soros – global financier, author
Avie Tevanian – software whiz who was the architect of Apple’s OS X
Linus Torvalds – developer of the Linux open source computer operating system
Ted Turner – philanthropist and former television and media impresario
Craig Venter – founder of Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research, and the J.Craig Venter Institute, which is now creating synthetic biological organisms for use in research and industry
Jimmy Wales – founder of the Wikipedia online, user-generated encyclopedia and resource library
James Watson – co-discovery of the structure of DNA
Oprah Winfrey – television and media impresario
Steve Wozniak – co-founder of Apple, designer of the Apple I and Apple II personal computers
Jerry Yang and David Filo – Yahoo founders
Future Techonomists (in alphabetical order):
The only difference between these people and the ones on the previous list is their relative youth. These are people mostly under 35 who have already changed our world, and from whom we can expect to see more transformative ideas. We single them out because the best ideas often come from people who don’t have a vested interest in the status quo, and see no reason not to try to invent better ways of doing things themselves. That is the techonomic spirit, pure and simple.
Brent Constantz – founder and CEO of Calera, which is pioneering carbon sequestration technologies to capture CO2 from coal-fired power plants and binding it into cement through the use of bio-mineralization
Kevin Czinger – the former Goldman Sachs investment banker is CEO of Coda Automotive, California designer of electric vehicles that are manufactured in China
Elisabet de los Pinos – founder and president of AuraBiosciences, which uses nano-particles to deliver drug therapies more precisely to very specific locations in the body
Allan Golston – the former investment banker heads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Educational Development programs, and hopes to help devise new financing methods for charter schools
Achim Kopmeier – co-founder of Epuramat, maker of various water purification products for both industrial use and in remote, economically underdeveloped locations
Christina Lampe-Onnerud – founder of Boston Power, a maker of lithium ion batteries that can be recharged thousands of times, versus hundreds for most today
Robin Li – co-founder and CEO of Baidu, operator of the most popular search engine in China and the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ 100 Index
Rajiv Mehrotra – CEO of VNL, and Indian designer of solar-powered cellular mobile phone base stations that can bring mobile phone and broadband services to the way out back
Mark Palmer – president of StreamBase, one of the first complex event processing services whose first government clients aren’t nameable because their work is classified
Stephen Quake – a Stanford biosciences professor who has invented technologies for handling genetic samples that are the basis of two companies – Fludigm and Helicos BioSciences
Miles Rubin – founder and co-chairman of Coda Automotive, is an 81-year-old entrepreneur who earlier in his life was CEO of Detroit Iron & Steel industries, and later of Polo Ralph Lauren Jeanswear
K.R. Sridhar – co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy, a maker of solid oxide fuel cells that generate electricity by chemical reaction rather than combustion, an energy source that could be applicable off the grid
Kevin Surace – CEO of Serious Materials, which makes sustainable building materials like ultra-insulated windows and glass, and a drywall substitute that also insulates
Anne Wojcicki – the Stanford-educated geneticist is the founder of 23andMe, which develops tests to identify gene markers for susceptibility to particular diseases
Mark Zuckerberg – founder and mastermind of Facebook, the leading Internet social network platform