From Imhotep to the Shipping Container: Four Thousand Years of Building Things

Imhotep: chancellor and chief architect to Pharaoh Djoser, and the earliest engineer known to history by name, whose Step Pyramid at Saqqara was the first monumental building of dressed stone.

Copper: already an old material by Imhotep's time, worked by human hands since roughly 9000 BCE and, alloyed with tin into bronze, the metal that gave the Bronze Age its name.

The Blast Furnace: a continuous smelting method known in China by the Han dynasty, and the one Abraham Darby fired with coke instead of charcoal in 1709, freeing iron production from the limits of the forest.

Ada Lovelace: writing Note G in 1843 for a machine that was never finished in her lifetime, she published what is now recognized as the first algorithm meant to be carried out by a machine.

Wilbur Wright: with his brother Orville, solved the lateral-control problem that had defeated every earlier flight experimenter, and flew the first sustained, controlled powered flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903.

Fazlur Rahman Khan: the structural engineer whose tubular system let a supertall building resist wind with a fraction of a conventional frame's steel, proven on Chicago's DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments and the Willis Tower.

Hedy Lamarr: a Hollywood film star and, at the same time, self-taught co-inventor of a jam-resistant radio guidance system in 1942 whose frequency-hopping principle underlies Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS today.

Containerization: Malcolm McLean's 1956 standardized shipping box, which cut freight handling cost so sharply that historians count it among the enabling conditions for today's globally dispersed manufacturing.