| By Gale Staff |
The world we know today was once unimaginable. Before the first light bulb flickered to life, nightfall meant darkness. Before vaccines, diseases ravaged communities unchecked. Before the telephone, messages could take weeks to arrive. Every invention begins with someone who sees the world not as it is, but as it might be. In May, we celebrate these innovators with National Inventors Month.
To support K-12 learning during National Inventors Month, Gale In Context: Elementary, Middle School, and High School offer compelling content that presents inventors as real people who grappled with failure, celebrated discovery, and reveled in the joy of creation.
With Gale In Context, you can explore the stories of inventors like Ralph Baer, creator of some of the earliest video games—or Donna Strickland, who, in 2018, became just the third woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Below, we’ve included a list of nine inventors to help you get started, complete with links to relevant biographies, primary documents, historical images, and videos. We’ve designed National Inventors Month activities for different grade levels so students can explore the inventive process through developmentally-appropriate research projects.
Mary Anderson (1866–1953)
By the early 1900s, automobiles began reshaping transportation, yet even the most basic driving challenges remained unsolved. Mary Anderson saw one firsthand: on a snowy day in New York City, while stuck in traffic, she watched a trolley driver repeatedly reach outside to clear his windshield. The problem was obvious, but no one had devised a workable solution.
Anderson’s idea was simple but effective: a hand-cranked wiper blade mounted on the windshield and controlled from inside the vehicle. Her patented “window cleaning device” let drivers physically move the blade back and forth across the glass, clearing away precipitation without taking their hands off the controls. This prototype eventually led to the automated windshield wiper we see in modern cars.
Ralph Baer (1922–2014)
Television was everywhere in the 1970s, but it was a one-way stream of entertainment with no room for interaction. Ralph Baer tapped into that gap to create the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, the first home video game console and the foundation of an entirely new industry.
The Odyssey couldn’t generate its own graphics, so players used plastic overlays on the TV screen while controlling a simple light dot with dials. Baer’s early games included Pong’s direct predecessor, Table Tennis, which introduced the idea of player-controlled movement, while Haunted House experimented with interactive storytelling.
George de Mestral (1907–90)
In 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral and his Irish Pointer Milka set off for an Alpine hunting trip. Upon returning home, Mestral noticed that both his clothing and Milka’s fur were covered in burrs. De Mestral examined them under a microscope and discovered the burrs were covered with tiny hooks that latched onto loops in fabric and fur.
After years of experimentation, de Mestral developed a practical process to recreate the nylon hook-and-loop system. So, in 1948, he developed Velcro—a portmanteau of the French words velours (velvet) and crochet (hook).
Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013)
Early computers were controlled exclusively through text-based commands, requiring users to memorize complex syntax just to open a file or run a program. Douglas Engelbart identified this as a significant limitation.
His idea was that, if computers were to ever reach their full potential, they had to be more user-friendly. Engelbart came up with a wooden device with two wheels that let users move a cursor on-screen, and the computer mouse was born. He also pioneered the graphical user interface (GUI), replacing lines of code with clickable icons, windows, and menus that we continue to rely on for intuitive computing today.
Percy Julian (1899–1975)
Chemist Percy Julian faced more barriers to invention than most, building his career in an era when black scientists were routinely denied access to top research institutions. Despite these adversities, he is the father of one of the most important pharmaceutical breakthroughs of the 20th century: synthesized cortisone.
Before Julian’s work, cortisone was exorbitantly expensive because it had to be sourced from oxen’s adrenal glands. The chemist discovered a way to create it with soybeans, dramatically reducing the cost of the anti-inflammatory drug and making it widely available for those living with arthritis, carpal tunnel, and other painful conditions.
Ada Lovelace (1815–52)
Most early mechanical devices were designed for specific tasks like weaving patterns or playing a particular series of musical notes. Ada Lovelace, however, saw something revolutionary in Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine: a machine that could be programmed to follow instructions.
In a series of notes, she documented how the engine could perform repeat operations and make decisions, both fundamental principles of modern programming. Her diagrams and explanations provided a conceptual framework that, though never built in her lifetime, earned Lovelace the title of the world’s first programmer.
Donna Strickland (b. 1959)
Some of the most transformative medical breakthroughs don’t come from medicine itself but from the physics that makes new treatments possible. Donna Strickland, a laser physicist, helped develop chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which paved the way for lasers’ usage in surgery. Before CPA, laser pulses were unsafe because they caused unintended damage to the surrounding tissue. With CPA, however, ultrafast, high-intensity laser pulses can perform precision cuts.
Jonas Salk (1914–95)
In the mid-20th century, polio was one of the most feared diseases in the world. While the medical community debated the best approach to a vaccine, Jonas Salk refused to sit around waiting for a consensus. As others tested risky, live-virus methods, Salk pioneered a killed-virus inoculation that could train the immune system without causing infection. Once mass immunization efforts had begun, polio cases plummeted worldwide.
In addition to being one of the greatest scientific minds of modern medicine, Salk was also an example of ethical, humanitarian efforts. When asked who owned the patent to his vaccine, he famously responded, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Frank Zamboni (1901–88)
Before Californian ice rink owner Frank Zamboni, maintaining a skating rink was exhausting and time-consuming. Workers had to scrape, shave, and flood the ice by hand, which was inefficient and delivered inconsistent results.
After years of trial and error, Zamboni finally introduced the first self-propelled ice surfacing machine in 1949. With a single pass, it could produce a smooth, professional-quality surface, creating demand for the machine at skating rinks and hockey arenas. Eventually, it was so ubiquitous that Zamboni the man became Zamboni the machine.
Encouraging Curiosity in Elementary Classrooms
National Inventors Month is the perfect time to channel young learners’ natural curiosity. Nurture their wonder through the lives of inventors who changed the world with their ideas. Through their stories, students see that great ideas start with asking, “What if?”
What if a machine could follow instructions to solve a math problem? Ada Lovelace asked that question nearly two centuries ago and laid the foundation for modern computing.
What if we could harness the power of a laser, but make it so precise, that it’s safe enough to use in the operating room? That challenge led Donna Strickland to develop chirped pulse amplification.
These examples, and countless others, demonstrate how embracing one’s curiosity can turn a simple question into something that makes the world a better place.
Educators can pair the biographies available through Gale In Context: Elementary with these engaging activities:
- Scientists and Inventors Escape Room challenges students to solve puzzles and answer clues based on famous inventors, reinforcing knowledge through play.
- Inventors Research Project builds research skills by helping students explore the lives and discoveries of famous innovators.
- Inventors Tarsia Puzzle strengthens problem-solving by requiring students to connect key facts about inventors in a hands-on, puzzle-based format.
Learning Through Iteration in Middle School
By middle school, students start thinking more critically about how things work. They’re also at the perfect stage to understand that failure is a natural part of the scientific and creative process. Seeing where others struggled, and how they adapted, helps students build a more realistic view of innovation.
Frank Zamboni knew that maintaining a smooth ice rink was an inefficient, multi-step process, but his first attempts at automating ice resurfacing didn’t go as planned. His earliest prototype—a tractor-towed machine atop a sled—wasn’t very effective at smoothing the ice. It took 11 years and multiple redesigns before the U.S. Patent Office awarded Zamboni with U.S. patent No. 2,642,679.
Douglas Engelbart faced similar challenges when designing the first computer mouse. His initial versions were bulky and imprecise, using two perpendicular wheels to track movement. Through repeated testing, Engelbart refined the design, experimenting with different materials and tracking methods until, in 1970, he settled on the “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System.”
The Inventors and Inventions Scavenger Hunt reinforces this by guiding students through Gale In Context: Middle School, where they will research inventors who encountered obstacles, revised their ideas, and ultimately made lasting contributions. Along the way, they’ll develop stronger research skills by using Advanced Search tools to locate and synthesize relevant information.
Weighing the Impact of Innovation in High School
Inventions change how we interact with the world. But who benefits? Who gets left behind? What risks were taken to make it possible? Gale In Context: High School can spark discussions about those breakthroughs that changed our lives and the trade-offs that come with them.
- Douglas Engelbart’s vision of a more accessible computer gave rise to user-friendly technology, but it also laid the groundwork for digital surveillance and data privacy concerns.
- Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine eradicated a deadly disease, yet debates over vaccine accessibility and intellectual property still rages on.
- Even Frank Zamboni’s ice resurfacing machine, a staple in skating and hockey, represents how automation can streamline industries while reducing the need for human labor.
The Inventors Choice Board gives learners ownership of their learning while encouraging them to consider not only the innovations themselves but also the benefits and the challenges they introduce.
Engage with Trusted Resources
Every new invention reminds us of a simple but powerful idea: Things don’t have to stay the way they are. But we must also be mindful that change can come with unintended consequences.
With Gale In Context, learners can engage with trusted resources and hands-on activities that challenge them to think critically about the past while preparing them to be the problem-solvers of the future.
Ready to explore how Gale In Context can support your students? Contact your local sales representative to learn more.