Time Machine

Alan Turing: The enigmatic codebreaker
Mathematician Alan Turing's role in cracking German ciphers shaped the course of the Second World War and saved millions of lives.
Masahiro Hara: he cracked the QR code
Drawing ideas from a board game, Masahiro Hara made the world a more efficiently pixellated place with a machine-readable matrix.
Luke Howard: the 'Godfather of Clouds'
By classifying clouds, Luke Howard brought order to meteorology.
This rod is a life-saver
Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment yielded shock-absorbing lightning rods.
2003: An ignoble tussle over a Nobel
Twenty years ago, a prize set off an unseemly controversy and cleaved the scientific community.