On January 9, 2007, Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs holds up an Apple iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco. Since that time, “smart” phones have been eagerly embraced by consumers around the world. Jobs, who died October 5, 2011, continued a long tradition of U.S. innovation, following in the footsteps of American inventors who have changed the everyday lives of people on every continent.

Founding Father and American original Benjamin Franklin was a writer, philosopher, diplomat, scientist and inventor. He’s credited with a number of technical breakthroughs, including the Pennsylvania Fireplace (later known as the Franklin stove), which produced more heat with less fuel than a conventional fireplace. In 1784, tired of switching between the glasses he needed to see distant objects and those he required for reading, Franklin invented hybrid lenses he called bifocals. Millions now benefit every day from Franklin’s innovation.

Scotland native Alexander Graham Bell settled in Boston, where he focused his considerable ingenuity on improving life for the hearing impaired. Bell’s mother and his wife were both deaf. He developed his “phonautograph” to help deaf students visualize sound. Eventually, that technology evolved into the telephone, and enabled people to converse across towns, across continents and across oceans. Bell first transmitted speech through his invention on March 10, 1876, and soon after unveiled the device at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World’s Fair in the United States.

A model of an 1879 streetlight burns in the Edison Museum in Edison, New Jersey, before a portrait of inventor Thomas Edison, known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” This lifelong experimenter brought the world electric light, recorded music and motion pictures. He also turned innovation into a science by inventing the research laboratory. Over his career, Edison would successfully patent a record 1,093 inventions in the United States, more than twice that of any other U.S. patent holder.

On December 17, 1903, a pair of inventors from Ohio named Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the world’s first airplane. The invention, known as the Wright Flyer, remained aloft for only 12 seconds, but it was a technological breakthrough that would effectively shrink the planet by allowing people to travel to anywhere on the globe in a matter of hours.

Philo Farnsworth, San Francisco–based inventor of the television, poses for a New York photographer in 1930. In 1927, he laid the groundwork for a communication revolution by becoming the first inventor to successfully transmit a television image. Perhaps prophetically, the image, composed of 60 horizontal lines, formed a dollar sign.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Intel Corporation Chairman Andy Grove stand with three new laptop computers flanked by two very old personal computers at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California, in 2001. In 1977, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created a homemade microprocessor computer board called Apple I; IBM rolled out its “PC” in 1981. Neither would have fulfilled its promise without microchip processors and sophisticated programs. Ultimately, the computer became personal through the efforts of many engineers, programmers and entrepreneurs who collaborated and competed to bring the public the next big breakthrough.