Alabama native Mary Anderson is credited with inventing the first operational windshield wiper. In her November 10th, 1903, patent, she called her invention a window-cleaning device for electric cars and [more]

Created by the U.S. Congress on May 18, 1933, The Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, is the nation’s largest public power company and a world-renowned regional development agency. It operates [more]

Montgomery native Percy L. Julian was an internationally acclaimed chemist. The third African American to receive a Ph.D. in chemistry, he specialized in the chemistry of natural products and their [more]

Daniel Pratt was Alabama’s first major industrialist and founded the present-day city of Prattville as a self-sufficient manufacturing center. His factory complex, the Pratt Gin Company, became the world’s largest [more]

When the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik in October 1957, the United States needed to quickly join the Space Race. Werner von Braun, head of the U.S. Space Program at [more]

Luther Leonidas Hill Jr. was a prominent Montgomery physician and pioneering surgeon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In 1902 Hill became the first American physician to perform [more]

Located in the heart of Alabama’s aerospace industry, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville is dedicated to the U.S. space program. The collections span the history of space [more]

James Withers Sloss started the Sloss Furnace Company in 1880 to take advantage of the mineral wealth of the Jones Valley. He built Sloss’s first blast furnace the following year.  [more]

Horace King was the most respected bridge-builder in the southeast during the mid-nineteenth century. As a slave until 1846, King and his master John Godwin worked as partners on major [more]