Technology and the built world

Jackup rig

A jackup rig is a mobile offshore drilling unit towed to a site with its legs raised, then jacked down to the seafloor for shallow-water drilling.

Jacob & Co

Jacob & Co is an American luxury jewelry and watch house founded in New York in 1986 by designer Jacob Arabo, known for elaborate timepieces such as the Astronomia.

Jacob Duygu

Jacob Duygu, known by the pseudonym JStark1809, was a German national who designed the FGC-9, the most frequently encountered 3D-printed firearm, and co-founded Deterrence Dispensed.

Jacob H. Douma

Jacob H. Douma (Jacob Henrick Douma) was an American hydraulic engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1971.

Jacob L. Jones

Jacob L. Jones is an American materials scientist at North Carolina State University known for X-ray and neutron scattering studies of piezoelectric and ferroelectric materials.

Jacob M. Geist

Jacob M. Geist (Jacob Myer Geist) was an American cryogenic engineer elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and chief engineer at Air Products in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Oct 10, 2026

Jacob Millman (1911–1991) was a Russia-born American electrical engineer and Columbia University professor whose eight McGraw-Hill textbooks shaped electronics teaching and whose name survives in Millman's theorem.

Jacob P. Den Hartog

Jacob P. Den Hartog (1901–1989) was a Dutch-American mechanical engineer whose 1934 textbook Mechanical Vibrations became the classic vibration text, and whose absorber theory underlies tuned mass dampers.

Jacob Pieter Den Hartog

Jacob Pieter Den Hartog (1901–1989) was a Dutch-American mechanical engineer, MIT professor, and author of Mechanical Vibrations (1934), whose damped vibration absorber theory underlies tuned mass dampers.

Jacob Rabinow

Jacob Rabinow (1910–1999) was a Ukrainian-born American electrical engineer at the National Bureau of Standards who held about 230 U.S. patents, including the magnetic particle clutch and a letter-sorting machine.

Jacob T. Robinson

Jacob T. Robinson is an American neuroengineer, professor at Rice University, and co-founder and CEO of Motif Neurotech, which builds a therapeutic brain-computer interface for depression.

Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten

Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, known as Jaap, was a Dutch KLM captain and flight instructor killed in the 1977 Tenerife runway collision, the deadliest in aviation history.

Jacob Wernli Schaefer

Jacob Wernli Schaefer (1919–2002) was an American engineer and guided-missile pioneer at Bell Laboratories who proposed the antiaircraft missile system from which the Nike air-defense family evolved.

Jacob Wolfowitz

Jacob Wolfowitz (1910–1981) was an American statistician and information theorist, born in Warsaw, known for the Wald–Wolfowitz runs test and the monograph Coding Theorems of Information Theory.

Jacob Ziv

Jacob Ziv (1931–2023) was an Israeli information theorist and Technion professor who created the Lempel–Ziv compression algorithms behind gzip and GIF, and in 2021 became the first Israeli to receive the IEEE Medal of Honor.

Jacobs (company)

Jacobs (Jacobs Solutions Inc., NYSE: J) is a global professional services firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas, delivering infrastructure, engineering, and consulting; it ranked No. 1 on ENR's 2026 Top 500 Design Firms list.

Jacobs Engineering

Jacobs Engineering is the former name of Jacobs Solutions Inc., a global engineering and professional services company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, founded in 1947 by Joseph J. Jacobs.

Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation

The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation is UC Berkeley's interdisciplinary hub for hands-on design and technology learning, founded in 2013 and housed in Jacobs Hall, opened in 2015.

Oct 10, 2026

Jacobus Verhoeff

Jacobus (Koos) Verhoeff (1927–2018) was a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist whose 1969 dissertation introduced the Verhoeff algorithm, a check digit scheme detecting all single digit and adjacent transposition errors.

Jacopo Buongiorno

Jacopo Buongiorno is an MIT nuclear engineer known for research on reactor safety and boiling heat transfer, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024.

Jacquard machine

The Jacquard machine, developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard in Lyon and perfected in 1804–1805, uses chains of punched cards to automatically weave complex figured textiles.

Jacqueline Cochran

Jacqueline Cochran, born Bessie Lee Pittman, was an American aviator who set more speed and altitude records than any pilot and directed the WASP in World War II.

Jacqueline G. Gish

Jacqueline G. Gish is an American laser engineer who spent 33 years at TRW and Northrop Grumman developing high-power lasers, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011.

Jacques Cartier Bridge

The Jacques Cartier Bridge (pont Jacques-Cartier) is a five-lane steel cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River, linking Montreal with Longueuil on the South Shore.

Jacques Charles

Jacques Alexandre César Charles (1746–1823) was a French physicist and balloonist who made the first manned hydrogen balloon flight in Paris in 1783 and formulated Charles's law.

Jacques Gansler

Jacques "Jack" Gansler (1934–2018) was an American defense acquisition official and academic who served as the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer from 1997 to 2001, then taught at the University of Maryland.

Jacques I. Pankove

Jacques I. Pankove, also known as Jacques Isaac Pankove, was an American electrical engineer who led the RCA team that made the first gallium nitride blue LED in 1971.

Jacques Isaac Pankove

Jacques Isaac Pankove (1922–2016) was an American electrical engineer who led the RCA Laboratories team that built the first gallium nitride blue LEDs in 1971.