Famous Lefthander Birthday, July 30

U.S. Automobile Manufacturer and Inventor Henry Ford

Henry Ford II (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was born in Greenfield, Dearborn, Michigan. He was the American founder of the Ford Motor Company and considered the father of modern assembly lines for automobile mass production. His introduction of the Model T automomobile revolutionized transportation in America.

His commitment to lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities on other continents. He left most of his vast wealth to the Ford Foundation but arranged for his family to control the company permanently. As owner of the Ford Motor Company he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with what is termed as “Fordism” coined after his name, which means the mass production of large numbers of affordable automobiles using the assembly line, coupled with high wages for his workers. Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace.

A friend of the famous inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford II was also a prolific inventor and an innovator, and was awarded 161 U.S. patents.

Photo credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Famous lefty birthday, April 15

Italian polymath, scientist, inventor, artist, writer Leonardo da Vinci – famous for Mona Lisa and The Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci is famous for his masterful paintings Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and The Vitruvian Man.

Aside from being a painter, sculptor, engineer and architect, his notebooks also revealed he was a remarkable scientist and inventor. Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci was constantly on the move between various Italian cities.

Childhood Life in Tuscan Town of Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in the small Tuscan town of Vinci. Born illegitimate, his father had little time for him and he was mainly looked after by his grandparents and an uncle.

As a child, he proved extraordinarily gifted. He played the lyre and sang beautifully; he was also great at horse riding, and had a brilliant aptitude for mathematics. Anywhere he went, Leonardo da Vinci carried a notebook in which he wrote an account of his observations and sketched things that interested him.

Read full article — Leonardo da Vinci Moves to Italian Cities

Famous Left-hander Birthday, February 11

Inventor Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison is the most productive American inventor of his time. He received over 1,000 patents for practical applications of scientific principles, among them,  the electric light bulb and phonograph. He introduced one of the first cinematographs and improved Alexander Bell’s telephone by means of the carbon transmitter that increases the volume of the signal.  He also discovered the Edison Effect.

Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11, 1847. He spent most of his childhood in Port Huron, Michigan. He was largely self-taught, thanks to his mother’s patience with a smelly laboratory that he first set up when he was 10-years-old. At the age of 12, he became a railroad newsboy, printing his own newspaper of the Grand Trunk Railway. He moved his laboratory to a disused railway carriage.

Read more — Biography of Inventor and Scientist Thomas Alva Edison

Famous Left-hander Birthday, January 17

American Polymath Benjamin Franklin – Inventor, Statesman, Writer, Printer, Political Leader, Scientist, Soldier

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706  – April 17, 1790) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was one of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. A polymath, he was an author, printer, satirist, diplomat, politician, scientist, inventor, statesman,  and soldier.  His legacy of scientific and political achievement, and distinction as one of America’s most influential Founding Fathers, saw Franklin honored in the U.S. currency, both in coinage and money; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and numerous more references.

As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment Era.  He became remowned for his many inventions. He invented many things, such as the Franklin stove, lightning rod, bifocals, odometer, and many more. He also made discoveries relating electricity.

Franklin formed the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania. An early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist, he supported the idea of an American nation. As a diplomat during the American Revolution, Franklin secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the U.S. possible.

Franklin became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in Philadelphia. He published Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Pennsylvania Gazette. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society.

Benjamin Franklin became a U.S. national hero when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act.  An accomplished diplomat, he was a major figure in the development of the Franco-American relations, widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris.

From 1775 to 1776, Franklin was the Postmaster General, and from 1785 to 1788, the President of the Supreme Executive Ocuncil of Pennsylvania. Bejmain Franklin became one of the most prominent abolitionists in the last years of his life.

Photo Credit:  Wikimedia Commons

Photo by Michael Parker.
James Earle Fraser, sculptor

Lefty Trivia

The man who invented the sewing machine, Elias Howe was a lefty. Simply because he was, he put the needle on the left side of the machine – where it has remained today.

Lefty Trivia on Leonardo da Vinci

Lefty Leonardo da Vinci – Italian polymath, scientist,  inventor, artist, mathematician, writer – was a man so much ahead of his time. Not only did he conceive of a flying wing, he also sketched the design for a telescope 100 years before it was even invented.

Famous Lefthander Birthday, August 13

Actress, inventor and entrepreneur, Quinn Cummings

Quinn Cummings was born on born August 13, 1967, in Los Angeles, California. She’s an American movie and television actress, entrepreneur, inventor, and author.  A child-actress, she was nominated for an Oscar in her role in Neil Simon’s 1977 adaptation of the The Goodbye Girl, as Marsha Mason’s daughter, Lucy McFadden.

Photo Source:  CelebrityNooz

Left-handed Birthday Celebrant, July 9 – Inventor Elias Howe
Elias Howe (July 9. 1819 – October 3, 1867), American inventor and pioneer of the sewing machine. The Beatles movie Help! was dedicated to him.

Howe was born in Spencer, Massachusetts. He spent his childhood and early adult years in Massachusetts where he apprenticed in a textile factory and then for a master mechanic. Contrary to popular belief that he invented the sewing machine, many other people  had worked on the idea of such a machine before him. However, Howe refined these ideas into a functional machine. On September 10, 1846, he was awarded the first United States patent (#4750) for a sewing machine that uses a lockstitch design.

Howe was forced to defend his patent in 1854 because when he came back to the U.S. from a trip to Europe, he found that Isaac Singer had perfected his machine and was selling it with the same lockstitch that Howe had invented. He won the dispute and earning him huge royalties. He contributed much of the money he earned to the Union Army during the Civil War, having served in the U.S. Army in the Civil War as a private.

He established the Howe Machine Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1865 and his sewing machine won the gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.  Howe was inducted in 2004 into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame. He died at the  age 48.

Related article —  History of the Sewing Machine

Left-handed Birthday Celebrant,  July 9 - Inventor Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943), a world-renowned Serb-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer, is regarded as one of the most important inventors in history. He was an ethnic Serb born in the village of Smiljan, Vojna Krajina, in today’s Croatia. By birth, he was a subject of the Austrian Empire. Later, he became an American citizen. 

Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions in electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current electric poser (AC) systems,  AC electric power, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor. It’s no wonder that one of his heroes is Michael Faraday, the English pioneer of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Testa was only 11 years old when Faraday died. Among others, Tesla is known for Tesla turbine, teleforce, Tesla oscillator, Tesla electric car, Tesla principle, Tesla Egg of Columbus. 

His awards include Edison Medal (1916), Elliott Cresson Gold Medal (1893) and John Scott Medal (1934).      

Nikola Testa died in New York. at the age of 86.