Vocation : Engineer : Other Engineer

Billy Wade "Bill" Spiller (4 June 1926 – 23 September 2004) was a public broadcasting pioneer in the U.S. state of Virginia.
A native of Tulia, Texas, Spiller was working as an engineer for KATC-TV, the ABC station in Lafayette, Louisiana, when in 1963, he was recruited to become the first general manager of WCVE-TV (Channel 23) and Central Virginia Educational Telecommunications Corporation in Richmond, Virginia. The company became Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Company.
Beginning in January 1964, he worked to construct and establish the new public television station. WCVE-TV first went on the air September 14, 1964, and in the 27 years that followed, Spiller spearheaded the establishment of three additional public television stations in central and Northern Virginia, saved a financially troubled station, and stepped in to prevent public radio from disappearing from Richmond.
The community-owned public broadcasting company was established in 1961 by Thomas Boushall and a group of concerned citizens to employ television for educational purposes. The patron saints of public broadcasting in central Virginia were Spiller, Boushall, E. Claiborne Robins Sr. and Mary Ann Franklin. Mrs. Franklin first approached Boushall and Henry I. Willett, then Superintendent of Richmond City Schools, with the idea of establishing an educational television station. Boushall and Franklin then recruited Spiller, who was hired in December 1963 and began working for them in January 1964, three years before the establishment of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), of which WCVE-TV became a charter member.
WCVE's sister station, WCVW (channel 57) signed on in 1967 after Spiller successfully petitioned the FCC to grant a license for a second public television station. Richmond became the first community in Virginia to have dual public television stations, and only the eighth in the nation to do so.
In 1974, Commonwealth Public Broadcasting took over WNVT, a Fairfax public TV station on the verge of financial insolvency, to support the continuation of Northern Virginia-based educational programming. In 1981, Spiller oversaw the establishment of a second Northern Virginia station, WNVC, primarily serving the international community in the Washington area by rebroadcasting non-English language news and public interest programming. Those stations continue to operate today as MHz Networks, and are still owned by CPB.
When Union Theological Seminary announced its plans to give up its public radio license for WRFK, Spiller ensured that public radio would remain alive and well in Richmond and in 1988, WCVE-FM radio went on the air. The following year, under Spiller's leadership, the company established a Charlottesville public television station under call sign WHTJ; that station became a translator for WCVE.
Spiller's final contribution to the growth and development of public broadcasting in central Virginia occurred just before his retirement, with the addition of a 25,000 square foot (2,300 m²) TV and radio studio-office complex at 23 Sesame Street in Bon Air in 1991.
He died on September 23, 2004.

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci ( may-OO-chee, Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo meˈuttʃi]; 13 April 1808 – 18 October 1889) was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy. Meucci is best known for developing a voice-communication apparatus that several sources credit as the first telephone.Meucci set up a form of voice-communication link in his Staten Island, New York, home that connected the second-floor bedroom to his laboratory. He submitted a patent caveat for his telephonic device to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his caveat. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound by undulatory electric current. Despite the longstanding general crediting of Bell with the accomplishment, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities supported celebrations of Meucci's 200th birthday in 2008 using the title "Inventore del telefono" (Inventor of the telephone). The U.S. House of Representatives in a resolution in 2002 also acknowledged Meucci's work in the invention of the telephone, although the U.S. Senate did not join the resolution and the interpretation of the resolution is disputed.

Marie Félix Albert Durand de Grossouvre (23 August 1849, Bourges – 18 May 1932, Bourges) was a French geologist, best known for his research in the fields of stratigraphy and paleontology.

Joseph Henri Ferdinand Douvillé (16 June 1846 – 19 January 1937), also known as Henri Douvillé, was French paleontologist, geologist and malacologist. Douvillé worked as a mining engineer in Bourges (1872) and Limoges (1874), afterwards serving as professeur suppléant of paleontology at the École des Mines. From 1881 to 1911 he was a professor of paleontology at the École des Mines.

Jules Carpentier (30 August 1851 – 30 June 1921) was a French engineer and inventor.
Jules Carpentier was a student at the French École polytechnique.
He bought the Ruhmkorff workshops in Paris when Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff died and made it a successful business for building electrical and magnetical devices. From 1890, he started to build photographic and cinematographic cameras. He is the designer of the submarine periscope, and worked at the adjustment of trichromic process of colour photography.
He patented the "Cinématographe", which serves as a film projector and developer in the late 1890s, and built devices from the Lumière Brothers.
Another of his patents, filed in England, was a primary reference of Theodor Scheimpflug, who disclaimed inventing the falsely eponymous Scheimpflug principle.He died in 1921 in a car accident in Joigny, France.

Marie Adolphe Carnot (27 January 1839 – 20 June 1920) was a French chemist, mining engineer and politician. He came from a distinguished family: his father, Hippolyte Carnot, and brother, Marie François Sadi Carnot, were politicians, the latter becoming President of the third French Republic.
He was born in Paris and studied at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines. He became a member of the Corps des mines, and from 1864 to 1867, served as a mining engineer in Limoges. From 1868 to 1877 he was a professor of preparatory courses and general chemistry at the École des Mines in Paris, where from 1877 to 1901, he worked as a professor of analytical chemistry.In 1881 he was appointed Chief Engineer of Mines, and in 1894, was named Inspector General of Mines. He became director of the École des Mines in 1901, a post he held until 1907. Aside from administrative work and teaching and training many engineers, he wrote a treatise on the chemical analysis of minerals (Traité d'analyse des substances minérales, published 1898) and pursued research. The uranium ore carnotite is named after him.He was honoured with membership of the Académie d'Agriculture (1884) and Académie des sciences (1895), and was made a Commander of the Légion d'honneur (1903). He also pursued a political career.

Henri-Alexis Brialmont (Venlo, 25 May 1821 – Brussels, 21 July 1903), nicknamed The Belgian Vauban after the French military architect, was a Belgian army officer, politician and writer of the 19th century, best known as a military architect and designer of fortifications. Brialmont qualified as an officer in the Belgian army engineers in 1843 and quickly rose up the ranks. He served as a staff officer, and later was given command of the district of the key port of Antwerp. He finished his careers as Inspector-General of the Army. Brialmont was also an active pamphleteer and political campaigner and lobbied through his career for reform and expansion of the Belgian military and was also involved in the foundation of the Congo Free State.
Today, Brialmont is best known for the fortifications which he designed in Belgium and Romania and would influence another in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The fortifications he designed in Belgium at the end of the 1880s around the towns of Liège, Namur and Antwerp would play an important role during the early stages of the German invasion of Belgium during World War I.

Henri-Émile Bazin (10 January 1829 – 7 February 1917), also known as Henry Bazin, was a French engineer specializing in hydraulic engineering, and whose main contributions relate to the systematic study of free surface flows and the measurement of flows (gauging).

Charles-Émile Reynaud (8 December 1844 – 9 January 1918) was a French inventor, responsible for the praxinoscope (an animation device patented in 1877 that improved on the zoetrope) and was responsible for the first projected animated films. His Pantomimes Lumineuses
premiered on 28 October 1892 in Paris. His Théâtre Optique film system, patented in 1888, is also notable as the first known instance of film perforations being used. The performances predated Auguste and Louis Lumière's first paid public screening of the cinematographe on 26 December 1895, often seen as the birth of cinema.