European Innovators Who Shaped America
European-born engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and thinkers whose ideas reshaped American industry, science, and culture.
Einstein had already produced relativity and won the Nobel Prize in 1921 by the time Hitler took power.
Bell was raised in a household devoted to elocution and the speech of the deaf — his mother was deaf, his father invented Visible Speech — and his life's work…
Fermi won the 1938 Nobel Prize for his work on neutron-induced radioactivity.
Frankfurter arrived in New York at twelve, speaking no English, settled with his family on the Lower East Side, and attended P.S.
Bethe was dismissed from the University of Tübingen under the 1933 Nazi civil-service law because of his Jewish mother.
Married at nineteen to an Austrian arms manufacturer with Nazi sympathies, Hedwig Kiesler fled both husband and country in 1937, reached London, signed an MGM…
By 1913, Sikorsky had built and flown the Russky Vityaz, the world's first successful four-engine aircraft, and at twenty-four was one of the most celebrated…
Trained at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Berlin under Hegel, Roebling arrived in western Pennsylvania in 1831 with a plan for a German agricultural…
Muir's family emigrated from Dunbar to a Wisconsin homestead in 1849, where his father's punishing Calvinism shaped him in ways he later resisted.
Pulitzer crossed the Atlantic in 1864 as a substitute recruit for a Union Army veteran, having been rejected by Austrian, French, and British militaries on…
Agassiz arrived in Boston in 1846 to deliver lectures, was offered a Harvard professorship the following year, and never returned to Europe.
Pupin arrived at Castle Garden in 1874 with five cents in his pocket.
Tesla landed in New York in 1884 with four cents and a letter of introduction to Thomas Edison.
Goldwyn left Warsaw as a teenager, walked across Germany to Hamburg, worked his way across England, and arrived at Halifax and then New York in 1898.
The Brin family left the Soviet Union in 1979 as Jewish refusniks, after Sergey's mathematician father Mikhail had been blocked from physics graduate work and…
Sergey Brin, 2009. Photo by Herr Kriss via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 . Cropped for layout.
