The Greatest Inventors Alive Today

Inventors don't always receive the attention and rewards they deserve. The men and women who create new devices, technologies, and products have a powerful impact on our lives — almost always for the better. It's easy to see that impact when you think of famous inventors like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or Johannes Gutenberg. There's little doubt that our lives would be much different (and much worse) without the telephone, or recorded music, or mass-produced books.

It can sometimes seem like the glory days of invention are long behind us. In part, that's due to the increasing complexity and sophistication of technology, which makes inventions necessarily more subtle and less obvious. Inventing a new kind of widget for an existing machine doesn't have the same impact as inventing the original concept in the first place, after all. But that doesn't mean people haven't stopped inventing things — or that those inventions are any less incredible. Every day, brilliant people are going to work and cooking up the products and underlying technologies that will define the course of our collective futures.

That's why it's just as important to honor and celebrate living inventors as the legends from history. The scientists, engineers, and craftspeople creating tomorrow's technologies today shouldn't have to wait until they've passed into history to be celebrated — here are some of the greatest inventors alive today.

You may not be familiar with the name Kia Silverbrook, but in terms of sheer volume, he's one of the greatest inventors of all time. According to Gildshire Magazines, he's filed more than 4,000 U.S. patents in his life so far, often trading the record for most patents with his peer Shunpei Yamazaki. Incredibly, as noted by Business Insider, Silverbrook's patents range widely among different industries and technologies, including digital music and mechanical engineering.

In fact, as noted by ILMM magazine, if you look outside the United States, Silverbrook has nearly 10,000 patents in his name — a truly incredible number of inventions. Many of his inventions affect your life on a regular basis — if your phone's camera identifies and focuses in on people's faces automatically, you can thank Silverbrook for the underlying technology that drives that.

Silverbrook's inventions have often had an enormous impact. In 2007, he helped invent a new printing technology called Memjet that was so revolutionary it was initially considered a hoax. So why is such a prolific inventor so obscure? The answer is simple: Most of Silverbrook's inventions are "under the hood" stuff that's difficult to separate from other technologies, and almost all of them are owned by corporations instead of Silverbrook himself.

Wherever you are in the modern world, you are probably connected to and reliant on the Internet in some way. And while the Internet is an incredibly complex system of technologies working in concert, the backbone of it all remains the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP): the set of "rules" that govern how data is transmitted. And for that, you can thank Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, because as noted by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, they collectively invented TCP and IP.

According to Northern Virginia Magazine, Kahn was working at Stanford University and Kahn was working for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the early 1970s. When Cerf also joined DARPA in 1976, the two joined forces and began work on the revolutionary invention that would build on packet-switched networking technology already in existence to create an interconnected global system of data networks — the Internet.

Based on societal impact alone, Cerf and Kahn deserve to be numbered among the greatest inventors of all time. As noted by The Atlantic, without their invention we wouldn't have any of the nice things we have to day — like online shopping, Netflix, or the ability to order a pack of gum from Amazon and have it delivered within an hour.

If you know the name Dean Kamen, it's probably because of the Segway. As reported by Slate, the Segway was launched in 2001 with an incredible amount of hype. The invention was going to change the world, remake cities, and transform our lives. The disappointment that ensued when it was revealed that the Segway was just a very well-engineered and super advanced personal transporter.

The backlash was enormous and has served to obscure Kamen's legendary status as an inventor. As noted by Forbes, his inventions have had a huge impact in the treatment of a range of diseases including cancer and diabetes. According to the Stevens Institute of Technology, Kamen holds more than 1,000 patents, and the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame notes that Kamen's inventions include an at-home dialysis machine, the advanced LUKE prosthetic arm, and a portable drug infusion pump called AutoSyringe™.

Kamen has, in other words, had a tremendous positive impact on healthcare — which affects all of us. But most of his achievements have been overshadowed by his singular failure, the Segway — though that failure has been overstated. While the Segway never took off, Fast Company reports it remained in production for nearly 20 years, and it did find a market in security and tourism. Most importantly, as noted by Wired the Segway was rather revolutionary, filled with cutting-edge engineering that opened the door to the electric scooters, bikes, and skateboards people are racing about on today.

Winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier may wind up being two of the most important names in human history. As noted by The Guardian, their dual discovery and invention, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 — usually written simply as CRISPR — has made it possible to edit any DNA at any point very easily and straightforwardly. That will undoubtedly have profound implications for humanity going forward.

As reported by Nature, the invention of CRISPR tools has revolutionized, well, everything. Scientists can now alter genes at will, and can thus experiment with DNA edits to cure or prevent diseases, and change genetic traits. While the benefits of this power are obvious, so are the dangers. As reported by The New York Times, many people worry that gene editing may alter what it even means to be human — and these alterations may have completely unforeseen and not necessarily positive implications.

Doudna is locked in a battle for the patent rights to CRISPR (via The New York Times). Although she and Charpentier did the initial work, the first patents were awarded to Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Building off Doudna's research, Zhang performed the first experiments demonstrating that CRISPR would work on human cells, technically beating Doudna to the punch on that front. Still, patent or no patent, Doudna and Charpentier are undoubtedly the inventors of one of the most important tools humanity has ever seen.

If you've vacuumed your home or used a public bathroom, there's a good chance you've encountered some of Sir James Dyson's inventions. According to the encyclopedia Britannica, Dyson's first major invention was the Sea Truck, a landing craft designed to be fast and stable. He then invented the ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow-like conveyance that used a sphere instead of a wheel for better stability.

But at the factory where ballbarrows were made, Dyson had a dust problem: The air filters were perpetually clogged. So he built a cyclone particle collector to clear the air. As noted by Interesting Engineering, when Dyson became similarly frustrated by clogged vacuum filters while cleaning his home, he was inspired to invent the first bagless vacuum cleaner using a similar principle. Inc. reports that Dyson went through more than 5,000 failed prototypes before he finally had a design that worked.

As noted by CBS News, Dyson has gone on to invent a slew of other devices, including a bladeless fan called an "air multiplier," the Airblade hand dryer, and a new kind of clothes washing machine that was incredibly efficient, but far too expensive to put into production. Those 5,000 failed prototypes paid off, though — according to Bloomberg, he's currently worth close to $18 billion.

For most people, just working for The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would be a career highlight. If you're Jacqueline Quinn, that's just the starting point. As noted by The National Inventors Hall of Fame, Quinn works as an environmental engineer for NASA, and her inventions have been focused on cleaning up our polluted environment — in part because NASA has had a hand in polluting it.

NASA used to utilize chlorinated solvents to clean rocket engines, but these solvents are heavier than water and can easily sink into groundwater, making it toxic. As reported by NASA itself, Quinn's solution was to invent emulsified zero-valent iron (EZVI), which acts as a 'sponge' to soak up the contaminants in water, purifying it. EZVI has been licensed for commercial use, meaning that it's improving the health of our planet and increasing the amount of safe drinking water every single day.

And Quinn didn't stop there — as noted by The Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, she's also invented ways of removing cancer-causing elements from soil and materials, and she holds 12 U.S. patents. It's safe to say that Quinn is one of the most important thinkers in the field of environmental remediation, and someone who is tackling humanity's negative impact on our environment head on — with inventions.