Technology and the built world

Framos

Framos is a German imaging technology company near Munich, founded in 1981, supplying embedded vision components, camera modules, and engineering services for automation and robotics.

France and weapons of mass destruction

France, sometimes called French nuclear weapons, is one of nine nuclear-weapon states with an estimated 290 warheads, built through 210 tests from 1960 to 1996.

France Robots

France Robots was a French robotics company whose founding, model range, and disappearance are thinly documented; it operated in a fragile French sector that entered robotics in 1974 through Renault.

France Télévisions

France Télévisions, also known as France TV, is the French national public television company, wholly state-owned, operating France 2, France 3, France 4, and France 5.

Frances Allen

Frances Allen was an American computer scientist at IBM who pioneered optimizing compilers, becoming in 2006 the first woman to win the ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Frances E. Lockwood

Frances E. Lockwood is an American chemical engineer and lubricant scientist who retired as Valvoline's chief technology officer and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021.

Sep 20, 2026

Frances M. Ross

Frances M. Ross is an American-based materials scientist, the TDK Professor at MIT since 2018, known for in situ electron microscopy of crystal growth and nanowires.

Francesco Bonaccorso

Francesco Bonaccorso is an Italian physicist and materials scientist known for liquid-phase exfoliation of graphene, and co-founder and Scientific Director of BeDimensional SpA in Genoa.

Francesco Bullo is a control theorist and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, known for research on network systems, robotic coordination, and synchronization in power grids.

Francesco De Angelis (nanotechnologist)

Francesco De Angelis is an Italian nanotechnologist who leads the Plasmon Nanotechnologies unit at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, applying plasmonics to biosensing and intracellular recording.

Francesco Ricci (Italian chemist)

Francesco Ricci is an Italian chemist and full professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, known for DNA-based electrochemical biosensors and for defining dissipative DNA nanotechnology.

Francesco Schettino

Francesco Schettino, born in 1960 near Naples, is the Italian former captain of the Costa Concordia, which struck rocks off Giglio in 2012, killing 32 people.

Sep 20, 2026

Francesco Stellacci

Francesco Stellacci (born 1973) is an Italian materials scientist and nanotechnologist, full professor at EPFL since 2010, known for work on striped nanoparticle surfaces and nanoparticle cell entry.

Franchi

Franchi, formally Luigi Franchi S.p.A., is an Italian firearms manufacturer founded in Brescia in 1868, now part of the Beretta Group and known for hunting shotguns and the SPAS-12 combat shotgun.

Franchi SPAS-12

The Franchi SPAS-12 is an Italian 12-gauge combat shotgun made by Luigi Franchi in Brescia from 1979 to 2000, distinguished by a selectable dual-mode action: gas-operated semi-automatic or pump.

Franchise and regional capacity purchase agreement

A capacity purchase agreement (CPA) is a fixed-fee contract in which a major U.S. airline buys a regional airline's flying capacity, keeping the passenger revenue.

Francie (doll)

Francie is a fashion doll introduced by Mattel in 1966 as Barbie's 'Mod'ern cousin', a teenage doll built to showcase the youth-oriented Mod fashions of the mid-1960s.

Oct 10, 2026

Francis Bashforth

Francis Bashforth (1819–1912) was an English mathematician, Anglican priest, and ballistics expert who invented the Bashforth chronograph for measuring the varying velocity of projectiles in flight.

Françis Garnier

Françis Garnier, also known as Francis Garnier, is a French materials scientist at CNRS who built the first all-organic transistor in 1990 and the first printed all-polymer transistor in 1994.

Francis H. Clauser

Francis H. Clauser (1913–2013) was an American aeronautical engineer and fluid dynamicist at Caltech, one of the founders of the modern science of turbulent boundary layers.

Francis K. McCune

Francis K. McCune was an American engineering executive who rose to vice president of General Electric's atomic products division by 1955 and shaped the company's nuclear business.

Francis L. LaQue

Francis L. LaQue (1904–1988) was a Canadian-born corrosion scientist who spent 42 years at International Nickel and created renowned seawater corrosion test sites at Kure Beach, North Carolina.

Francis Scott Key Bridge (Baltimore)

The Francis Scott Key Bridge was a 1.6-mile steel truss bridge carrying Interstate 695 over the Patapsco River at Baltimore's outer harbor; opened in 1977, it collapsed in 2024 after a ship strike.

Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse

The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse occurred on March 26, 2024, when the containership Dali lost power and struck the bridge in Baltimore, killing six workers.

Francis Scott Key Bridge replacement

The Francis Scott Key Bridge replacement, also called the Key Bridge replacement, is a cable-stayed bridge being built across the Patapsco River in Baltimore after the original collapsed in 2024.

Francis turbine

The Francis turbine, a mixed-flow reaction water turbine invented by James B. Francis in 1849, is the most commonly used turbine type in hydropower generation worldwide.

Francis VerSnyder

Francis Louis VerSnyder was an American high-temperature metallurgist who invented the single-crystal turbine blades used in jet engines, receiving the National Medal of Technology in 1986.

Francis W. Boulger

Francis W. Boulger was an American metallurgist who led the Ferrous Metallurgy Division at Battelle in Columbus, Ohio, and wrote widely used reports on metal deformation processing.

Oct 21, 2026

Franciscan friary

Franciscan friary (Greyfriars): a house of the mendicant Franciscan order in England from 1224; about 60 existed by the 1530s. The Richmond friary, founded 1257-8 and dissolved January 1539, survives as scheduled monument 1020405.