7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7Intelligence and curiosity are unquestionably important
assets for inventors, but having an advanced degree—or
even a formal education—has never been a prerequisite.
Thomas Edison studied at home with his mother. Orville
and Wilbur Wright never finished high school. George
Washington Carver, who began life as a slave, taught him-
self to read from the only book he possessed—Webster’s
Elementary Spelling Book.
What ultimately fueled the spark of discovery and led
inventors to their “eureka” moment was unique to each
person. Dr. Robert H. Goddard, who pioneered the first
rocket-powered spacecraft, became fascinated with the
idea of space flight after reading H.G. Wells’s science fiction
novel The War of the Worlds. Decades before Henry Ford
introduced the Model T automobile and designed the
moving assembly line, he became fascinated with the inner
workings of clocks and watches. When Steve Wozniak,
inventor of the Apple II computer, was 11 years old, he
built a computer so that he could play tic-tac-toe.
Often inventors were inspired by one another. Orville
and Wilbur Wright became interested in aviation after
reading about German aviation engineer Otto Lilienthal’s
experiments with gliders. In turn, the Wright Brothers’
famous 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., inspired a teen-
aged Russian boy named Igor Sikorsky to later invent the
world’s first single-rotor helicopter.
Some inventions throughout history have occurred
purely by accident. In 1796, in an effort to find an inexpen-
sive way to print his own plays, Austrian actor and
playwright Alois Senefelder stumbled across the promising
potential of using fine-grained stone instead of copper
plate, thereby inventing the process of lithography. In
1839, businessman Charles Goodyear was looking for a
way to make natural rubber more pliable, when he acci-
dentally spilled some rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot