The people who worked this out

The people who worked this out, in date order: the pile, the law, the coil, the filament, the wave, the transistor, the hopped signal, the chip. Every build on this board is one of their ideas, wired.

Every card opens on a build already on this board — see how each idea shows up in the Classroom.

  1. 1800 Alessandro Volta The first battery, and the end of a long argument
  2. 1827 Georg Simon Ohm The law that lets you calculate a circuit before you build it
  3. 1831 Michael Faraday A changing current in one coil makes a current in another
  4. 1882 Lewis Latimer The filament that made the light bulb last
  5. 1887 Heinrich Hertz He made Maxwell’s waves and watched them cross a room
  6. 1942 Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil A piano roll, a torpedo, and a patent nobody used for twenty years
  7. 1947 Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley The amplifier that replaced the valve, and the argument that followed
  8. 1958 Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce Two answers to the same problem, six months apart