Famous Engineers

These people are engineers or have an engineering background.

This includes Tom Landry, Montel, Scott Adams (Dilbert creator), Alfred Hitchcock, and Tom Scholtz (lead of rock band Boston) among others… (see below) Scott Adams – cartoonist and creator of “Dilbert” – read an interview with him in Prism Magazine

Yasser Arafat – Palestinian leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Graduated as a civil engineer from the University of Cairo.

Neil Alden Armstrong – became the first man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, at 10:56 p.m. EDT. He and “Buzz” Aldren spent about two and one-half hours walking on the moon, while pilot Michael Collins waited above in the Apollo 11 command module. Armstrong received his B.S. in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University and an M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California.

Rowan Atkinson – A British comedian, best known for his starring roles in the television series “Blackadde”r and “Mr. Bean,” and several films including Four Weddings And A Funeral. Atkinson attended first Manchester then Oxford University on an electrical engineering degree.

Leonid Brezhnev – leader of the former Soviet Union, metallurgical engineer.

Alexander Calder – a native of Pennsylvania, received his degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, and shortly thereafter moved to Paris, where he studied art and began to create his now-famous mobiles. Many of his large sculptures are on permanent outdoor display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the first major retrospective of his work was held in 1950.

Frank Capra – film director – “It Happened One Night”, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, “It’s a Wonderful Life” – college degree in chemical engineering.

Jimmy Carter – 39th President of the United States. Attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology and received a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. In the Navy he became a submariner, serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for the nuclear submarine program, he was assigned to Schenectady, N.Y., where he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior officer of the pre-commissioning crew of the Seawolf.

Roger Corman -film director, industrial engineering degree from Stanford University. He started direct involvement in films in 1953 as a producer and screenwriter, making his debut as director in 1955. Between then and his official retirement in 1971 he directed dozens of films, often as many as six or seven per year, typically shot extremely quickly on leftover sets from other, larger productions. His probably unbeatable record for a professional 35mm feature film was two days and a night to shoot the original version of “The Little Shop of Horrors”.

Leonardo Da Vinci – Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies – particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics – anticipated many of the developments of modern science.

Thomas Edison – Edison patented 1,093 inventions in his lifetime, earning him the nickname “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” The most famous of his inventions was an incandescent light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the kinetoscope, a small box for viewing moving films. He also improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Edison was quoted as saying, “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Lillian Gilbreth – is considered a pioneer in the field of time-and-motion studies, showing companies how to increase efficiency and production through budgeting of time, energy, and money. Dr. Gilbreth received her Ph.D. in psychology from Brown University and was a professor at Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering, Newark School of Engineering and the University of Wisconsin. She is “Member No. 1” of the Society of Women Engineers. She and her husband used their industrial engineering skills to run their household, and those efforts are the subject of the book and family film “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

Roberto C. Goizueta – former chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola. Chemical engineering degree from Yale University.

Herbie Hancock – jazz musician.

Alfred Hitchcock – British-born American director and producer of many brilliantly contrived films, most of them psychological thrillers including “Psycho”, “The Birds”, “Rear Window”, and “North by Northwest.” He was born in London and trained there as an engineer at Saint Ignatius College. Although Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for his direction, he received the Irving Thalberg Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1967 and the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1979. During the final year of his life, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, even though he had long been a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Herbert Hoover – having graduated from Stanford University in California, Hoover was a 26 -year-old mining engineer in Tientsin, China, when the city was attacked by 5,000 Chinese troops and 25,000 members of the martial arts group known as the Boxers. (The Boxer Rebellion was a violent 1900 uprising against foreign business interests in China.) Hoover took charge of setting up barricades to protect Tientsin until its rescue after 28 days of bombardment. Thirty years later, Herbert Hoover became the 31st President of the United States; he and his wife continued to speak Chinese when they wanted privacy in the White House.

Lee Iacocca – former chairman and CEO of Chrysler Corp. Iacocca graduated from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., in 1945 and received a master’s degree in engineering from Princeton University in 1946. Best known for his helmsmanship at Chrysler Motors, Iacocca started out as a sales manager at the Ford Motor Co. in 1946 and by 1970 was president of the company. Joining Chrysler in 1978, Iacocca helped drag the troubled company from the brink of extinction by helping secure $1.5 billion in government loans. Iacocca’s legendary status in the automobile industry is reinforced by his role in the introduction of that American icon: the Ford Mustang. He was also one of the first CEOs to proselytise his company’s products on national television with the K car campaign.

Bill Koch – yachtsman and winning America’s Cup captain in 1992 , as well as the chairman of the America3 Foundation.

Tom Landry – former Dallas Cowboys coach.

Hedy Lamarr – a famous 1940s actress not formally trained as an engineer, Lamarr is credited with several sophisticated inventions, among them a unique anti-jamming device for use against Nazi radar. Years after her patent had expired, Sylvania adapted the design for a device that today speeds satellite communications around the world. She is also credited with the line: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

Jair Lynch – 1992 and 1996 Olympic gymnast. Civil Engineering degree from Stanford University.

Arthur Nielsen – developer of Nielsen rating system.

Tom Scholtz – leader of the rock band Boston. Master’s degree from MIT in mechanical engineering.

John Sununu – former White House Chief of Staff for President George Bush, former governor of New Hampshire, current CNN commentator on “Crossfire.”

Boris Yeltsin – former president of Russia.

John F. Welch, Jr. – received his engineering undergraduate degree in his home-state at the University of Massachusetts. After he earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, he accepted a job offer from General Electric. The rest is history — he became chairman and CEO of General Electric in 1981.

Montel Williams – a highly decorated former Naval engineer and Naval Intelligence Officer, he is now an author of inspirational books and host of a popular syndicated television talk show.

Source: destinationdigital.org