MIT has an extraordinary history of serving as the breeding ground for some of the most important and revolutionary inventions of the last 100 years. Dating back to 1896, this partial list of inventions and patents demonstrates MIT's leadership as a champion of technological innovation.

1896
Using the air current from the Institute's ventilating system, a small wind tunnel with a speed of 15 mph is built by MIT students under the guidance of Professor Gaetaro Lanza, founder of MIT's Mechanical Engineering Department.

1895
MIT biologist Samuel C. Prescott 1894 and William Lyman Underwood begin time and temperature studies that will provide the scientific basis for canning food.

1902
Rayon, or "artificial silk," is patented by Arthur D. Little, Class of 1885, and Henry S. Monic.

1925
Vannevar Bush '16, Herbert R. Stewart '24, and Frank D. Gage '22, build Product Integraph, MIT's first analog computer.

1933
Robert Jenison Van de Graaff invents the Van de Graaff Generator used in high-energy physics.

1934
Harold E. Edgerton '27 and Kenneth J. Germeshausen '31 devise electrical circuits to create stroboscopic light, making possible the new field of high-speed photography, as well as the night time reconnaissance technology used in World War II.

1936
John B. Wilbur '26 develops the simultaneous calculator, an analog computer.

1937
Warren K. Lewis '05 and Edwin R. Gilliland '33 invent a fluid-bed method of catalytic cracking, enabling an entirely new field of chemical engineering that includes the manufacture of high-performance polymers.

1944
Jay W. Forrester '45 and Robert R. Everett '43 of the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory begin research that leads to the development of the Whirlwind Computer. (The Whirlwind 1 comes online as a high-capacity, high-speed, reliable digital computer in 1953.)

1952
Jerome B. Wiesner and Wiliam H. Radford '32 develop tropospheric scatter from their research in over-the-horizon communication; subsequently, over-the-horizon radar became a key component of air defense radar systems.

1956
Random access magnetic core memory is developed by Jay W. Forrester '45.

1956
William Shockley '35 is the first MIT alumnus to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his development of the transistor.

1957
John C. Sheehan achieves chemical synthesis of penicillin, which ultimately generates more than $12 million in licensing revenues for MIT.

1963
Time-sharing computer systems are developed by Robert M. Fano '41, Fernando J. Corbato '56, and others in MIT's Project MAC (Machine-Aided Cognition and Multi-Access Computer).

1977
Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman develop the Public Key Cryptography for securing electronic data transmissions

1979
Dr. Marilyn Wolfson '83, '90 leads FAA's Convective Weather Product Development Team in developing Convective Weather Forecast Algorithms to accurately predict weather for forecast companies.

1982
MIT Professor of Chemistry Alan Davison, Dr. Alun Jones of the Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology, and Dr. Michael Abrams Ph.D. '83, discover Technecium-99, a new brain-imaging agent that diagnoses damage caused by heart disease. The agent is marketed by the DuPont-Merck Pharmaceutical Company as Cardiolite.

1982
MIT Professor William Schreiber develops Color Imaging Editing Software, patented by Electronics for Imaging (EFI) and licensed to some 20 companies, including Apple Computer Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc.

1988
MIT develops Automated Speech-Recognition Software, which is licensed by SpeechWorks International.

1991
James Bellingham, the Lab manager for the MIT Sea Grant AUV Lab, develops the revolutionary Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and co-founds Bluefin Robotics Corporation, which licenses the technology.

1993
MIT develops Phantom Interface Hardware and licenses this touch sensation technology for computers to SensAble Technologies.

1994
Anant Agarwal, MIT professor in electrical engineering and computer science, together with graduate students Jonathan W. Babb and Russell G. Tessier, develop a programmable gate array technology called Virtual Wires. This logic simulation in specialized hardware was used to launch a start-up called Virtual Machine Works, Inc., which was later acquired by IKOS.

2002
MIT researchers create the world's first acrobatic robotic bird--a small, agile helicopter that the military could use in mountainous and urban combat and that could offer the entertainment industry a new means of capturing aerial imagery.