Click on any of the inventors' names to learn more.
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Ernesto Blanco
Innovator of Devices Which Assist the Physically Challenged  Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Ernesto Blanco is one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's leading teachers and practitioners of invention. Most of his over a dozen patented inventions have been in textile machinery, surgical apparatus, or devices that assist the physically challenged.
Born in 1922, Ernesto Blanco excelled in academics and upon completion of high school was accepted to study engineering at Havana University. Upon completion of his degree, Blanco worked as Chief Draftsman of Havana's City Planning Department before coming to the United States in 1949. Working days as a Chief Surveyor for an Albany, New York firm, Blanco spent his evenings attending classes and earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. Deciding to return to Cuba, Blanco was hired to direct the School of Mechanical Engineering at Havana's Universidad de Villanueva. In fact, Blanco designed the University's updated laboratories and created its curriculum. In 1960, he returned to the US to teach at MIT and Tufts University. During this time, Blanco worked with the United States State Department, helping to develop Latin American cooperative engineering programs. In his own work, Blanco began to focus on industrial design.
By 1969, Blanco was a specialist in the design of textile machinery. He spent five years as a consultant before founding his own business, Universal Textile Corp., in 1974. Blanco's textile inventions include devices that detect faulty needles in knitting machines (patented 1977); center and spread out rolls of fabric; and control the tension of yarn during weaving. Blanco was also inventing in other areas. For example, under contract with the National Science Foundation, he designed the first of his many aids for the blind, a Braille Cell Display System.
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Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena
Color Television 
Guillermo González Camarena was a Mexican engineer born in Guadalajara, Mexico in February, 1917. When Camarena was two years old, his family moved to Mexico City, where he began to display true creativity and a gift for electronics. As a young boy, Camarena made electrically propelled toys and by the age of twelve had built his first amateur radio.
In 1930, Camarena graduated from the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineers at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico and within two years obtained his first radio license. An avid stargazer, Camarena built his own telescope during this time and became a regular member of the Astronomical Society of Mexico. In 1932, after two years of studies, Camarena left the mechanical-electrical engineering program at the National Polytechnic Institute to work as an operator at the radio station of his country's Department of Public Education. |
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Carlos Finlay
Discovered that Mosquitoes Transmitted Yellow Fever  Juan Carlos Finlay was born in Puerto Principe, Cuba on December 3, 1833. His father, Scottish physician Edward Finlay, had moved to Cuba two years earlier with his French wife, Eliza de Barrés. Shortly after arriving in Cuba, they formally changed their names to Isabel and Eduardo to show how much they loved their new country.
In 1847, at the age of 13, Juan Carlos was sent to Germany to begin his primary studies, and later to the town of Rouen in France, where his father had studied medicine. When he returned to Cuba as a teenager, he asked to legally change his name to Carlos Juan, as a way to further embrace his Cuban identity.
In 1851 Carlos attended Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1855, and completed his studies in Havana, and in Paris. Afterwards he settled in Cuba and opened a medical practice. In 1865 Dr. Finlay sent a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Havana outlining his theory on weather conditions and the yellow fever disease. He was the first to theorize that a mosquito was the way by which yellow fever was transmitted; a mosquito that bites a victim of the disease could bite a healthy person and spread the disease. |
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Baruj Benacerraf - Medical Pioneer and Nobel Prize Winner  Baruj Benacerraf is a pathologist and immunologist who discovered the genes that regulate the body's immune responses and showed how these genes are involved in autoimmune diseases (in which the immune system mistakenly attacks instead of defends). In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, for "discovery of the Major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self." The award was shared with Jean Dausset and George D. Snell. Born in Caracas, Venezuela in October, 1920, Benacerraf was the son of Sephardic Jews: his father was born in the Spanish Morocco and his mother in Algeria. Benacerraf moved to Paris from Venezuela with his family in 1925. After going back to Venezuela, he emigrated to the USA in 1940 and earned his B.S. at Columbia University School of General Studies. He then went on to attain the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the Medical College of Virginia, the only school to which he was accepted. After his medical internship and in the immediate years following World War II, Benacerraf served in the United States Army and while working at the US military hospital of Nancy, he became a researcher at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. |
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