7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Students, precision machinery, personal relationships,
and federal patronage in civilian and military form made
Draper a towering figure in 20th-century engineering
and engineering education. Ironically, at the height of his
success, in the late 1960s, both he and the I-Lab became
the focus of inquiry into the effects of military patronage
on MIT. After much protesting by antiwar activists and
internal discussion among faculty and administrators,
MIT decided in 1970 to divest itself of the laboratory. It
was renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.,
and moved off campus in 1973. For a man who was first and
foremost a teacher, it was the most undeserved of fates,
especially at the institute whose modern form he had done
so much to shape. Nonetheless, Draper’s career reflected
one of the fundamental changes in 20th-century academia:
the transformation of academic research into big business
supported by the armed services and major corporations.
In partial recognition of the scope and significance of
Draper’s career, the National Academy of Engineering
established the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 1988 to
honour “innovative engineering achievement and its
reduction to practice in ways that have contributed to
human welfare and freedom.”

Walt Disney

(b. December 5, 1901, Chicago, Ill., U.S.—d. December 15, 1966,
Los Angeles, Calif.),

W

alter Elias Disney, an American motion-picture
and television producer and showman, became
famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the
creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and
Donald Duck. He also planned and built Disneyland, a
huge amusement park that opened near Los Angeles in