Gustav III was King of Sweden from 1771 until his assassination in 1792. He was the eldest son of King Adolf Frederick of Sweden and Queen Louise Ulrika (a sister of King Frederick the Great of Prussia), and a first cousin of Empress Cather...

Sir William Jones was an Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages. He, along with Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Hal...

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was court painter to the Spanish Crown; throughout the Peninsular War he remain...

Julien Offray de La Mettrie 1709-1751) is the first modern materialist. His Man a Machine is a passionate, popular presentation of materialism and atheism, more provocative than any earlier work. One of the leading physicians of his time, L...

Leopold II was Holy Roman Emperor from 1790 to 1792, King of Hungary, archduke of Austria, and Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765 to 1790. He was a son of Emperor Francis I and his wife, Empress Maria Theresa. Leopold was a moderate proponent...

Abraham-Louis Breguet or Bréguet, born in Neuchâtel in Switzerland, was a horologist who made many innovations in the course of a career in watchmaking in France. He is the founder of Swiss luxury watch brand Bréguet. Breguet became a membe...

William V, Prince of Orange was the last Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic. He went into exile to London in 1795. He was the reigning Prince of Nassau-Orange until his death in 1806. In that capacity he was succeeded by his son William....

Charles IV was King of Spain from 14 December 1788 until his abdication on 19 March 1808. When King Charles was told that his son Ferdinand was appealing to Napoleon against Godoy, he took the side of the minister. When the populace rose at...

Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity tow...

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas inf...

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau was a French revolutionary, as well as a writer, diplomat, journalist and French politician. He was a popular orator and statesman. During the French Revolution, he was a moderate, favoring a consti...

In 1795 Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre was admitted to the Bureau des Longitudes, becoming President in 1800. In 1801 he was appointed secretary to the Académie des Sciences making him the most powerful figure in science in France. In 17...

Jenner was an English physician and pupil of John Hunter, a pioneer in comparative anatomy and morphology. Jenner's invaluable experiments, beginning in 1796 with the vaccination of eight-year-old James Phipps, proved that cowpox provided i...

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, was an influential French scholar whose work was important to the development of mathematics, statistics, physics, and astronomy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume M...

German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. Throughout his life Goethe was interested in a variety of studies and pursuits. He made important discoveries in connec...