Henry Cavendish was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine La...

George Washington was the first, and only nonpartisan, President of the United States (1789–97), the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He...

Carl Gotthard Langhans was a Prussian builder and architect. His works are among the earliest buildings in the German classicism movement. His best-known work is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It was commissioned by King Frederick William...

Joseph Haydn was a prominent and prolific composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the piano trio and his contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets "Father of the Sym...

Warren Hastings was the first Governor-General of Bengal, from 1772 to 1785. He was famously accused of corruption and impeached in 1787, but after a long trial he was acquitted in 1795. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1814....

The Prophecies of Daniel and The Apocalypse. This fascinating and little known work of Sir Isaac Newton has been fully re-typeset and includes three colour plates (one of Thornhill's portrait of Newton, and two of Woolsthorpe Manor) and a f...

The War of the Polish Succession (1733–1738) was a major European war for princes' possessions sparked by a Polish civil war over the succession to Augustus II, King of Poland that other European powers widened in pursuit of their own natio...

Jeremiah Dixon was an English surveyor and astronomer who is best known for his work with Charles Mason, from 1763 to 1767, in determining what was later called the Mason–Dixon line. Dixon was born in Cockfield, near Bishop Auckland, Cou...

Joseph Priestley was an 18th-century English theologian, Dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, educator, and political theorist who published over 150 works. He is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen, having isolated it in it...

Dona Maria I was Queen of Portugal from 24 February 1777 until her death in 1816. Known as Maria the Pious in Portugal and Maria the Mad in Brazil, she was the first undisputed queen regnant of Portugal and the first monarch of Brazil. M...

Daniel Boone was an American pioneer, explorer, and frontiersman whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now Kentucky, which was...

John Adams was the second President of the United States of America. He was President from 1797 until 1801. His Vice-President was Thomas Jefferson. Adams belonged to the Federalist Party. John Adams was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on Oc...

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French physicist. He was best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion, but also did important work on friction. The SI unit of electric char...

Joseph-Louis Lagrange was an Italian-born mathematician and astronomer, who lived part of his life in Prussia and part in France, making significant contributions to all fields of analysis, to number theory, and to classical and celestial m...

James Watt was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. W...