Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst, Freiherr von Weber was a German composer, conductor, pianist and critic, one of the first significant composers of the Romantic school. Weber's works, especially his operas Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon gr...

General Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish soldier, adventurer and confidence trickster who attempted from 1821 to 1837 to draw British and French investors and settlers to "Poyais", a fictional Central American territory that he claimed to ru...

Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin KCH FRGS RN was a British Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer. Franklin also served as governor of Tasmania for several years. In his last expedition, he disappeared while attempting to chart and navigate a...

Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author and anthropologist, and the younger brother of Jakob Grimm, of the library duo the Brothers Grimm. Wilhelm's character was a complete contrast to that of his brother. As a boy, he was strong and hea...

The First Fleet is the 11 ships which left Great Britain on 13 May 1787 to found a penal colony that would become the first European settlement in Australia. The fleet consisted of two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict t...

Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer is known for discovering the dark absorption lines known as Fraunhofer lines in the Sun's spectrum, and for making excellent optical glass and achromatic telescope objectives. In 1814 Fraunhofer invented the...

Shaka (Tshaka, Tchaka or Chaka; sometimes referred to as Shaka Zulu; was the most influential leader of the Zulu Kingdom. He is widely credited with uniting many of the Northern Nguni people, specifically the Mtetwa Paramountcy and the Ndwa...

Louis Daguerre was a doctor, a painter and a theatrical set designer, but he is best remembered as one of the inventors of photography. Both he and Nicéphore Niepce began their initial experiments separately, but in 1829, they teamed up. Ni...

Ivan Nabokov was a Russian Adjutant general and general of infantry prominent during the Napoleonic wars. Nabokov came from an old noble family based in the Novgorod governorate, where his father general Alexander Nabokov was a landowner...

Sir Samuel Cunard, a Canadian-born British magnate, was a giant of Atlantic shipping. When the British government invited bids (1838) for carrying mail between England and Boston, Cunard's carefully considered plans won him the contract, an...

Emma Willard was an American women's rights advocate and the pioneer who founded the first women's school of higher education. When Emma Willard addressed the New York legislature in 1819 on the subject of education for women, she was contr...

Sacagawea, also Sakakawea or Sacajawea, was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition achieve each of its chartered mission objectives exploring the Louisiana Purchase. With the expedition, between 1804 and 1806, she...

Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the short lyric She Walks in Beauty. He is regarded as...

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the...

The Infante Carlos of Spain was the second surviving son of King Charles IV of Spain and of his wife, Maria Luisa of Parma. As Carlos V he was the first of the Carlist claimants to the throne of Spain. He is often referred to simply as 'Don...