Adolphe Kégresse (1879-1943) spent ten years working - partly as a chauffeur - for Tsar Nicholas II in Russia. Egypt gave the world its gigantic pyramids, beautiful Cleopatra, glorious Tutankhamun and many more immortal valuables that have an indispensable impact on many civilisations to come. One such disease was smallpox, which killed 400,000 Europeans annually during the 18th century – that’s from a population of around 150 million in total. Nicholas Callan (1799-1864) of County Louth in Ireland was a priest with a fascination for science. If you are reading this article, you know how the story went from there.

Thousands of lives were saved, and Bazalgette’s sewer system is still in operation serving 10 million Londoners today. But in 1825, Stephenson had got far enough to open the Stockton and Darlington Railway, on which his engine, achieved a maximum speed of 24 miles per hour.

In the process he also became an expert in the subject of catalysts. Ada Lovelace is known for two things: being the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, and her work as the world’s first computer programmer. A constant-velocity joint, more often referred to in the motor industry as a CV joint, allows two shafts to turn at equal speeds even though they are joined at an angle. His particular interest was electricity, which led him to build a huge battery and a phenomenally strong electromagnet. In the early nineteenth century, if you wanted to travel a long distance, you had to go by stagecoach – an enclosed coach pulled by horses. In 1904 he moved briefly into the automotive field, building the first car with an automatic gearbox. A child of Polish immigrants, Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) was born in Pennsylvania and intended to become a doctor. They effectively ushered in the dawn of the modern age. In 1796, however, Jenner not only successful infected an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps – his gardener’s son – with a mild version of cowpox, he also tested the idea that this would protect him from smallpox by repeatedly exposing him to the disease. Close. Locomotives used for this kind of haulage were powerful rather than fast; Stephenson’s first locomotive travelled at just 4 miles per hour. Phipps proved to be immune. Paris-born François Isaac de Rivaz (1752-1828) inherited a love of invention from his father Pierre Joseph (1711-1772), whose work included the development of a perpetual clock powered by changes in air pressure and temperature. William Addis’ innovation in 1780 was to create mass-produced toothbrushes, based on an idea he had while imprisoned for causing a riot: a bone drilled with horsehair bristles stuck through the holes, in essence like a modern toothbrush. Before antibiotics, any bacterial infection was significantly more dangerous.

It’s now normal to brush your teeth twice a day, and William Addis helped make it so. No one can deny that books have power.

In his early 20s, Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin (1920-2002) helped developed an ejector seat which would hurl people out of Saab aeroplanes. Berners-Lee’s idea was of a global, interconnected information system that could be accessed via the internet. For many years Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, Robert Hooke (1635-1703) also did important work in gravity, microscopy, paleontology, astronomy and timekeeping. He was granted a patent for his idea, which he called a ‘safety cushion assembly for automotive vehicles’, in 1953. One of the most significant concerned the brakes, which were in the form of wooden blocks applied to the metal rear tyres by a lever. What follows is a list of who we believe were the true pioneers of the automotive age: Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) was a major figure in the scientific explosion of the 17th century. Unlike her contemporaries, Lovelace realised that the Engine “might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations” – a remarkable understanding of what computers might do that wasn’t made reality for another century. Shortly before World War I he disappeared from a ship sailing across the North Sea from Antwerp to London for reasons which are still unknown more than a century later.