War fought mainly in the Crimea between the Russians and an alliance consisting of the Ottoman empire, Britain, France, and Sardinia-Piedmont. It arose from the conflict of great powers in the Middle East and was more directly caused by Rus...

One of the four great Post-impressionists (along with Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne), Vincent van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt. His reputation is based largely on the works of the...

José Julián Martí Pérez was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as a renowned poet and writer. Active in the Cuban independence movement from boyhood, he was deported to Spain in 1871, returning in 1878. Exiled again for con...

Cecil John Rhodes was a British imperialist and the effective founder of the state of Rhodesia (since 1980 known as Zimbabwe), named after himself. He profited greatly from southern Africa's natural resources. Rhodes was born in Bishop's...

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist. His scientific career was spent exploring extremely cold refrigeration techniques and the associated phenomena. In 1908, he was the first physicist to liquify helium, using cryostats. Using the...

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and elucidation of the Zeeman effect. Lorentz studied physics and mathematics at the University of Leiden, where...

André Jules Michelin was a French industrialist who, with his brother Édouard (1859–1940), founded the Michelin Tyre Company (Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin) in 1888 in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1900, André...

John Frank Stevens was an American engineer who built the Great Northern Railway in the United States and was chief engineer on the Panama Canal between 1905 and 1907. Stevens resigned suddenly from the Canal project in 1907 to Roosevelt's...

Salomon August Andrée, during his lifetime most often known as S. A. Andrée, was a Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and polar explorer who died while leading an attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole by hydrogen balloon. The balloo...

Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Among Wilde's other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gr...

Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff was a Russian neuropsychiatrist, known for his studies on alcoholic psychosis. His name is lent to the eponymous Korsakoff's syndrome and Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome. Korsakoff was one of the greatest neurop...

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it...

Cornelis Lely was a Dutch civil engineer and statesman. He was the figure responsible for the Zuiderzee Works, which meant the enclosure of the Zuiderzee by means of the Afsluitdijk, and subsequently draining parts of it into polders. All t...

Aletta Jacobs was the first woman in Dutch history to be officially admitted to university. This took place in 1871. As a schoolgirl she had written a letter to Prime Minister Thorbecke requesting permission to be allowed to attend “academi...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...