The Locations Where Great Discoveries Were Made

Explore the places where famous inventors and scientists worked, lived, and studied

Inventions and scientific discoveries don’t just occur out of thin air. Most of the time it requires years of research, critical thinking, and numerous experiments to prove something’s existence or make an idea into a reality. For the innovators of the world, a place to work through these ideas is vital.

The buildings in this list are often multi-purpose, some are family homes turned into workshops, others are a sanctuary for thinking, and a few offer an insight into where it all started for these inventors and scientists. From a laboratory in Paris to a noodle museum in Japan, discover the locations where some of the most famous thinkers worked and lived.

1 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France

Located in the 5th arrondissement at 1, rue Pierre et Marie Curie, is the former laboratory of Marie Curie. Built 1911–1914, Curie worked here from 1914–1934 until her death. It was here, during World War I, where Curie worked to develop small, mobile X-ray units that could be used to diagnose injuries near the battlefront.

In the same laboratory, after Curie’s death, her daughter and son-in-law Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity, for which they received the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The building has since been turned into a museum dedicated to the Curie’s work. It contains a permanent historical exhibition on radioactivity and its applications, and displays some of the most important research apparatus used before 1940.

West Orange Laboratories, New Jersey, USA

At the corner of Main Street and Lakeside Avenue in West Orange, New Jersey stands a group of red brick buildings. These buildings used to make up Thomas Edison’s incredibly large laboratory complex and a short distance away was Glenmont, the 29-bedroom Victorian mansion where the inventor lived.

The complex was designed in 1887, by Henry Hudson Holly and for more than 40 years, the laboratory had a major impact on the lives of people worldwide. Out of the West Orange laboratories came the motion picture camera, improved phonographs, sound recordings, silent and sound movies, and the nickel-iron alkaline electric storage battery. The site is now a National Historical Park that encompasses Edison’s home and lab complex.

Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico

Guillermo González Camarena (1917–1965) was a Mexican electrical engineer who introduced color television to Mexico and was the inventor of a color-wheel type of color television, which involved a “color wheel" that spun in front of an electronic scanning tube, presenting it with red, green, and blue images, and the receiver had a similar color wheel to reconstruct the full color image.

Camarena studied at the Higher School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (ESIME) at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), which you can see here. The engineer’s house on campus became a laboratory where friends and family chipped in with ideas including Jorge, his older brother, who helped him in his experiments to transmit color television.

University of Applied Sciences Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

The Physical Institute of the University of Würzburg, now the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg, was the sight of one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in medical history. In a small laboratory located in the university, on November 8 1895, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered a new kind of ray, which he called X-rays.

Only after tireless further investigations did Röntgen publish his discovery on the December 28. Then, following an invitation by the Physical-Medical Society of Würzburg, Röntgen gave his only public lecture on the topic on January 23 1896. During the presentation he performed an X-ray of the hand of the anatomist Albert von Kölliker in front of the audience. Five years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics.

A recreation of Röntgen's lab opened in 1985, the historic site honors the scientists work and also provides an insight into physics of the late 19th century.

Hawthorn Hill, Ohio, USA

Hawthorn Hill is a mansion in Oakwood, Ohio, built for Wilbur and Orvil Wright AKA the Wright Brothers, who are generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful airplane. The brothers intended the mansion to be their joint home, but Wilbur died in 1912, two years before the home’s completion in 1914. Ultimately, Orville ended up living there with his father Milton and sister Katherine when the house was ready.

The brothers hired the prominent Dayton architectural firm of Schenck and Williams to realize their plans. Orville designed some of the mechanical features of the house such as the water storage tank used to collect and recycle rainwater, and the central vacuum system. The home was owned by the NCR Corporation after Orville's death until August 18, 2006, when the company donated the historic home to the Wright Family Foundation in honor of Orville's 135th birthday and National Aviation Day.

Melville House, Ontario, Canada

Known as Melville House in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, this was the first North American home of Alexander Melville Bell and subsequently of his last surviving son, scientist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

The younger Bell conducted his earliest experiments at this house and later invented the telephone at the Homestead (another building on the land) in July 1874. In a 1906 speech to the Brantford Board of Trade, Bell was quoted as saying: “The telephone problem was solved, and it was solved at my father’s home.” The whole site is now known as the Bell Homestead National Historic Site and Melville House now serves as a museum to the family and to the invention of the telephone.

Esplanade des Particules 1, Geneva, Switzerland

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Established in 1954, the organization’s main site is based in Meyrin, Geneva. Most of the roads on the CERN Meyrin site are named after famous physicists, such as Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein.

CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations. It has witnessed the invention of the Large Hadron Collider in 2008, the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2013, and the world wide web in way back in 1989 when Tim Berners Lee was working at CERN.

Villa Lewaro, Irvington, New York, USA

Villa Lewaro is a 34-room mansion in Irvington, New York. It was built for Madam CJ Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, who created specialized hair products for African-American hair in 1905 and was one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire. Villa Lewaro was built from 1916–1918 and its Italianate style is considered one of the best designs of renowned architect Vertner Tandy.

Walker used her home as a conference center on race relations issues and as a meeting place for people involved in the Harlem Renaissance, including W. E. B. Dubois and Langston Hughes. Walker died there in 1919 and the house was inherited by her daughter A'Lelia Walker, who owned it until she herself died in 1931. After various owners, the house became a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and has been a private residence since the mid-1980s.

Villa Griffone, Bologna, Italy

Villa Griffone in Bologna, Italy was the residence of the Marconi family from the mid-nineteenth century where Guglielmo Marconi, Italian radio pioneer, spent the majority of his life. It was in this villa that Marconi set up his first workshop and completed his first experiments in wireless telegraphy in 1895.

The inventor continued with his experiments in the UK where his system of wireless telegraphy was developed and established. After Marconi's death in 1937, the villa became the home of the Marconi Foundation set up in 1938 to keep alive the memory of the inventor.

Cup Noodles Museum, Ikeda-city, Osaka Prefecture, Japan

On August 25, 1958, Momofuku Ando invented the world's first instant noodles, “Chicken Ramen,” after an entire year of research using common tools in a little shed he had built in his backyard in Ikeda-city, Osaka Prefecture. Ando went on to establish Nissin Food Products Co. Ltd and develop the brands Top Ramen and Cup Noodle.

While the shed is no more, nearby is the Cup Noodles Museum, a museum dedicated to instant noodles and Cup Noodles, as well as Ando himself. The museum has an instant ramen workshop that lets visitors make their own instant noodles as well as a noodle factory where visitors can assemble their own personal Cup Noodles. There is also a second noodle museum dedicated to Ando and his work in Yokohama.

94 Woodstock Road, Oxfordshire, UK

Dorothy Hodgekin was a British chemist who developed protein crystallography, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. While working on this research, Hodgekin lived at 94 Woodstock Road in Oxfordshire, UK. The house also provided a home for her sister Joan Payne who lived there with her five children.

When Hodgekin was awarded her Nobel Prize, she was only the third woman to have received one, after Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie. An Oxfordshire Blue Plaque to honor the chemist’s achievements was placed on the house in May 2016.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA

In 1942, the United States government chose Oak Ridge, Tennessee as the site for developing materials for the Manhattan Project, a research and development project during World War II that resulted in producing the world’s first nuclear weapons.

The project laboratory, factory, and various other secret buildings took up a 17-mile-long (27 km) valley. Because of the large number of workers recruited to the area for the Manhattan Project, the Army planned a town for project workers at the eastern end of the valley. The architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) was contracted to provide a layout for the town and house designs. SOM Partner John O. Merrill moved to Tennessee to take charge of designing the secret buildings at Oak Ridge. Some of the world’s smartest brains worked on the Manhattan Project, including Chien-Shiung Wang, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leona Woods, Hans Bethe, and many more.

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