The inventors of 3-D printing, the first clean room, a faster athletic shoe and other inventions are being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame later this month.
The induction ceremony will take place May 21 in Alexandra, Virginia, at the United States Patent and Trademark Office campus in Washington, D.C.
Previous inductees include Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Mary Anderson, inventor of the windshield wiper, Ruth Benerito, who created wrinkle-proof cotton, and Beulah Louise Henry, inventor of the ice cream freezer.
Included in the 15 names of the 2014 inductees are three women, bringing the total number of females in the respected group to 24 out of 502 people.
Here are some of the 2014 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame:
Mildred Dresselhaus is recognized for her work on super lattice structures and related carbon technologies that are used in lithium-ion batteries.
|Frances H. Arnold|
Frances H. Arnold will be honored for her work on the evolution of enzymes, enabling solutions in chemical engineering, bio-engineering, medicine, pharmaceuticals and energy.
Track and field coach William Bowerman, credited with inventing a lighter and faster athletic shoe, is seen in this undated photo from Nike, the company that he co-founded. He will be honored posthumously.
Ashok Gadgil, director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is credited for solutions to provide clean water in developing nations.
|Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil|
Actress Hedy Lamarr, pictured in 1943, and composer George Antheil, pictured in 1957, will be honored posthumously with creating frequency-hopping techniques that were important in the evolution of modern wireless communications.
Willis Whitfield, honored posthumously, speaks by phone with someone inside an early model of the ultra-clean room he invented in 1962, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first modern clean room has aided the manufacturing of modern electronic devices.
|Howard Aiken, Benjamin Durfee, Frank Hamilton and Clair Lake|
Honored posthumously, these four inventors created the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC or Mark I), the first large-scale digital automatic calculator in the U.S. and a precursor to modern computer technology.
Charles Hull is being honored for his invention of stereolithography, commonly known as 3-D printing.