history, its impact needs to be major.
Understandably, this doesn’t happen very often.
Which means when it does happen, we should
With that in mind, we wanted to highlight inventors
who more than cleared the bar. The following nine
individuals all created something powerful enough to
change our habits, the way we think and, ultimately,
the way we live.
Steve Jobs’ narrative is one of big failures and even
greater redemptions. The Reed-college dropout
started Apple Computer in his parents’ garage in Palo
Alto, Calif. with engineering buddy Steve Wozniak in
1976. Their mission? Build a personal, portable
computer that everyone could use. They achieved
that with their second model of personal computer,
the Apple IIc.
In 1980, Apple went public with a market value of
$1.2 billion by the end of its first day of trading.
However within five years, following a series of
disappointing products and sales, Jobs was forced
out of the company.
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Undeterred, he started NeXT, a computer and
software company. Around this time, he invested $5
million in Pixar, the animation arm of George Lucas’s
film company. He continued to increase his
investment, until he controlled the company. It
proved a smart decision: Pixar went on to develop
multiple smash hit franchises, including Toy
Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.
Job’s stock was looking up and continued to rise. In
1996, NeXT was purchased by Apple and the
following year, Jobs was asked to return to the
beleaguered Apple and acts as its interim CEO -- a
position he held until shortly before his death in
2011.
During his tenure as chief executive, Jobs broadened
the scope of Apple’s products, transforming the
company to one of the most successful companies in
the world valued at upwards of $300 billion, thanks to
the success of the iPhone and iPad.
At age 31, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s
youngest billionaires worth more than $46 billion. As
the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, he also helms
the world’s most popular and influential social media
site that, as of January, had more than 1.5 billion
active monthly users.
Zuckerberg developed the social networking site with
friends while an undergrad at Harvard, ultimately
dropping out his sophomore year to focus on
Facebook full-time. He opened an office in Palo Alto,
Calif., where he raised $12.7 million in venture
capital.
Since then, Zuckerberg has aggressively grown the
company, which went public in 2012. Not only has he
developed a robust advertising and sales arm, but he
has rigorously built out Facebook’s capabilities and
user bandwidth by enabling native video services and
live streaming. Zuckerberg also spearheaded a
number of acquisitions, including Instagram, Oculus
VR and a Snapchat-like app called Masquerade.
The young mogul, who recently became a father, has
also grown into an outspoken philanthropist.
Through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg
and his wife have donated hundreds of millions of
dollars toward health and education initiatives.
Related: How to Find Your Hidden Creative
Genius
Elon Musk has been referred to as “the Henry Ford of
rockets.” The South African-born tech entrepreneur is
mythologized for a lot of things -- among them,
serving as the inspiration for tech industrialist Tony
Stark’s character in the Iron Man film franchise -- but
he’s probably best known for his attempt to conquer
private space travel with SpaceX.
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Musk founded the aerospace company in 2002 in
order “to revolutionize space technology, with the
ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other
planets,” according to the company website.
SpaceX is planning to launch its newest rocket --
named the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful
operational rocket in the world with reusable
launchers -- in November 2016.
Most people would be too busy running SpaceX to
focus on other projects. But Musk isn’t your typical
dude. In addition to SpaceX, the entrepreneur serves
as chief executive of Tesla Motor Co., an electric car
company, is chairman and co-founder of SolarCity
and is working to build a high-speed “ Hyperloop”
transportation system, which -- in theory -- could
revolutionize travel by cutting commute time from
Los Angeles to San Francisco to 30 minutes.
4. Anne Wojcicki
Image credit: Anne Wojcicki | Twitter
Anne Wojcicki is the co-founder and CEO of
23andMe, which sells direct-to-consumer genetic
testing kits that are easy to use -- it simply requires
that you mail in a saliva sample -- and relatively
inexpensive, at $199 a test.
The company’s genome kit, which was named
" Invention of the Year" by Time magazine in 2008,
tests for 36 recessive disorders, including sickle cell
anemia and cystic fibrosis.
In 2013, the company ran into trouble when it was
ordered by the FDA to stop selling its kits over
questions about the reliability of the results. Instead
of throwing in the towel, Wojcicki worked closely with
the agency to prove that the tests were accurate; in
2015, 23andMe launched an FDA-approved testing kit.
The company continues to innovate, recently raising
$115 million (at a $1.1 billion valuation) to develop its
drug-discovery arm.
At the turn of the century, automobiles were
regarded as toys for the very rich. Henry Ford was
intent on changing that. At the age of 40, after two
failed, previous attempts, the Michigan-born
engineer took another shot at building a powerful,
but affordable and reliable, mass-produced car.
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The end result was the Ford Model T, which sold for
approximately $850 in 1908. While the car quickly
won over customers, Ford was unable to meet the
growing demand thanks to his company’s limited
production capacity. And so the automobile
industrialist focused on innovating the assembly-line
process. Over the next decade, he made automobile
manufacturing more efficient and less costly with
modifications such as adding an automated conveyor
belt and training each worker to perform a single
task.
By 1919, the self-taught pioneer with an eighth-grade
education was producing more than half the cars in
the U.S. By lowering the cost of the automobile --
eventually to $350 -- he made cars part of the fabric
of middle class America.
Related: Forget Setting Goals. Focus on This
Instead.
6. & 7. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
“Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting
new things," Google co-founder Larry Page said in a
letter to the public announcing the creation of
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, back in August
2015.
Alphabet’s two co-founders, Page and Sergey Brin,
met as Ph.D. students at Stanford University in 1995.
Shortly after they collaborated on Backrub, a search-
engine company, while living in a friend’s garage in
Menlo Park, Calif.
The tech duo eventually changed the name of their
search engine from Backrub to “Google” (thank god)
and revolutionized the search-engine industry by
using a new algorithm that ranked a webpage based
on its back links (i.e. links on other websites that
refer back to a given webpage). Up until then, many
existing search engines used human-curated results.
In 2004, Google went public. Since then, the company
has diversified, rolling out products including Gmail,
Google Maps, Google + and Google Glass. The
company is also developing products in the self-
driving car, robotics, life sciences and AI industries,
among others.
With so many simultaneous projects, the founders
created Alphabet, a parent company, in 2015 that
serves as a holding entity to its many subsidiaries,
including Google. Brin serves as Alphabet’s president
and Page is its CEO.
8. Marie Curie
Physicist and chemist Marie Curie, who was born in
Warsaw, Poland, in 1867, was a standout individual.
That she was a woman living during a time when
science was an industry almost exclusively reserved
for men makes her accomplishments even more
impressive. In the face of convention, Curie became
the first female professor at Sorbonne University in
Paris, where she taught physics.
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In 1903, Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in
physics for her discovery of radioactivity. In 1911, she
won a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for
her discovery of two new elements: radium and
polonium. Her discovery of radium lead to the
development of using X-rays in medicine, and Curie
was at the forefront for cancer research, directing
the first studies that used radiation to treat tumors.
Tragically, it was her groundbreaking work that killed
her. She died in 1934 due to aplastic anemia, which is
caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.
Her contribution to society lives on, however. Curie
founded two cancer research institutes, one in Paris
and one in her birth-city of Warsaw, which remain
critical biomedical research centers for cancer
research today.
Related: How to Change Your Beliefs and Stick to
Your Goals for Good
9. Louis B. Mayer
Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) movie mogul Louis B.
Mayer, born in Russia, was responsible for iconic
American films such as Ben Hur, Singing in the Rain,
Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz. Mayer left
school at the age of 12 and stepped into the role of
breadwinner at a young age, supporting his parents
and four siblings by, among other things, collecting
heavy scrap metal for resale during brutally cold
Canadian winters in New Brunswick.
The ambitious Mayer eventually moved to Boston at
the age of 19 to expand the family’s scrap metal
business. Once there, he pounced on an opportunity
to purchase a rundown burlesque hall, which he
converted into a 600-seat movie theater. The theater
was a huge success, which eventually allowed him to
take over the entire New England movie theater
market.
However, it wasn’t until 1914 that he hit gold. Mayer
purchased the New England rights to D.W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation for $50,000. The movie was a smash
hit, making Mayer a cool $500,000. In 1918, he moved
to Los Angeles and formed the Louis B. Mayer
Pictures Corporation. Around this time, business
magnate Marcus Loew and film producer Samuel
Goldwyn merged companies to form Metro-Goldwyn
film studios for which Mayer was asked to head. He
agreed -- with the caveat that his name be added to
the studio’s name.
Hence the birth of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which he
ran for nearly three decades. MGM had the
distinction of being one of the few movie studios that
not only used technicolor but also remained
profitable during The Great Depression.
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