[GingisK]

There are so many giants upon whose shoulders we ride: Hans Oersted, Charles Babbage, Michael Faraday, Samuel Morse, Gugleeluo Marconi, James Maxwell, George Boole, Samuel Varley, Thomas Edison, Alexander Bell, Nicola Tesla, George Westinghouse, Almon Strowge, Lee DeForest, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, John Von Neumann, on and on. These are just a few of the electro-mechanical greats.

I have some machine shop books from the turn of the century. They are important to the manual shop, but contain universal information for machining. They are better written than any modern work.

[buwaya]

The nature of tech is that its a collective enterprise. Any little thing that works better is instantly copied. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but also on huge piles of dwarfs.

[takebackaustin]

Great electromagnetics list but I would have included Franklin at the beginning of that list, which undermines the OPs hypothesis of the insignificance of America and its founding geniuses.

The public library was the internet of its day too.