Secret Superheroes celebrates people who’ve overcome adversity, made amazing contributions to society, and inspired others to do the same. Each week we highlight exceptional people in different fields. This week we focus on invention.
James Dyson
He had the idea for his revolutionary cyclone vacuum cleaner in the 1970s, but James Dyson couldn’t get investment because the industry’s profits relied so heavily on the sale of dust bags. After a decade of struggle, James has now not only consigned the dust bag to history, but disrupted many more industries with his remarkable inventions while establishing himself as one of the UK's foremost philanthropists.
She should have been a tennis star, but when injuries ended her career as a teenager Yoky took an unusual path for a retired athlete; she wanted to build a robot tennis player, so she became a scientist. Her subsequent breakthroughs in neuroscience and robotics have powered the growing fields of assisted mobility and manipulation, and now she’s turning her remarkable skills towards helping working mothers manage their workloads.
When the prodigious computing talent of Ray Kurzweil designed his Kurzweil Reading Machine in 1976, his goal was to help the blind read, but he could never have guessed where his invention would take him. The first customer for his device was none other than Stevie Wonder, who wanted to know if the same technology could be used to improve electronic musical instruments; the results of that collaboration changed the face of music forever.
