On September 22, 1791, one of the greatest scientists in history, Michael Faraday, was born in Newington Butts, England (now in London). James Clerk Maxwell extended Faraday's work to develop our theories of electricity and magnetism.
Without Faraday and Maxwell, there's no electricity industry. Albert Einstein famously kept pictures of Faraday, Maxwell and Isaac Newton in his study.
Faraday invented electromagnetic rotary devices, the ancestors of motors and dynamos (generators). The unit of capacitance is the farad, named after him.
Faraday believed that electromagnetic forces extended into the space around electric conductors. But scientists in his time doubted there were lines of flux. Where would the Delorean time machine, in the film "Back to the Future," be without its flux capacitor?
On September 4, 1848, Lewis Latimer was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His parents were slaves in Virginia who escaped to Boston. The slave owner came to Boston to reclaim them, in one of the most important cases of the abolitionist movement. The slave owner was eventually paid for their freedom.