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MIT Inventions & Breakthroughs

MIT has a long history of entrepreneurship and innovation. From practical inventions to scientific breakthroughs, MIT has contributed greatly to the progress of the world over its 140+ year history. Below, find a list of just some of the inventions, breakthroughs, companies and creations that have come from the MIT community.

  • Ethernet - Robert Metcalf '68
  • The Supreme Court building - Cass Gilbert 1880
  • Campbell Soup - John Dorrance 1895
  • Theory of the inflationary universe - Prof. Alan Guth '68
  • GPS (Global Positioning System) - Ivan Getting '33
  • Lego Mindstorms - MIT Media Lab
  • Texas Instruments Inc. - Cecil Green '23
  • Artificial Skin - Ioannis Yannas SM '59
  • Hypertext - Prof. Vannevar Bush PhD '16
  • Technicolor - Herbert Kalmus 1903
  • Evidence of quarks - Professors Henry Kendall and Jerome Friedman
  • Disposable-blade safety razors - William Nickerson 1876
  • Plan for Canberra, Australia - Marion Mahony Griffin 1894
  • Fax Machine - Shintaro Asano SM '61
  • Spacewar, the first computer game - Steve Russell '60
  • Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Building - I.M. Pei '40
  • Inertial guidance system - Charles Stark Draper '26
  • Analog Devices, Inc. - Raymond Stata '57
  • Discovery of human oncogenes - Prof. Robert Weinberg
  • The Internet Archive - Brewster Kahle '82
  • Modern linguistics - Prof. Noam Chomsky
  • Doppler radar - Bernard Gordon '48
  • Voice recognition technology - Ray Kurzweil '70
  • The field of Marketing Science - Prof. John Little
  • "Car Talk" - Tom '58 & Ray '72 Magliozzi
  • Credit card holograms - Prof. Stephen Benton '63
  • RSA Public Key Cryptography - Professors Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman
  • Rockman amplifier - Tom Scholz '69
  • The World Wide Web - Senior Research Scientist Tim Berners-Lee
  • Biogen Inc. - Prof. Phillip Sharp
  • The "butterfly effect" - Prof. Edward Lorenz
  • Bose stereo - Professor Amar Bose '51
  • Rockefeller Center - Raymond Hood 1903
  • Spreadsheets - Daniel Bricklin '73
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