One hundred and fifty years ago [Summer 1826] Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in obtaining a camera picture on a polished pewter plate, sensitized with bitumen of Judea. This material has the unusual property of hardening in light (not bl...

Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who made contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann inte...

Spotted Elk was the name of a chief of the Miniconjou Lakota Sioux. He was a son of chief One Horn (Miniconjou) and became a chief upon the death of his father. He was a highly renowned chief with skills in war and negotiations. He became k...

Hormuzd Rassam was a native Assyrian Assyriologist, British diplomat and traveller who made a number of important discoveries, including the clay tablets that contained the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest literature. In addition, he f...

John Hanning Speke was an officer in the British Indian Army who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa and who is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile. In 1844 he was commissioned into the British army and p...

Charles-Theodore-Henri De Coster was a Belgian novelist whose efforts laid the basis for a native Belgian literature. His masterpiece was The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak (1867), a 16th-century romance, in which Belgian patr...

James Augustus Grant was a Scottish explorer of eastern equatorial Africa. In 1846 he joined the Indian army. He saw active service in the Sikh War (1848—49), served throughout the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and was wounded in the operations fo...

Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and politician noted for the Thomsen-Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances and disproved the theory of vitalism[citatio...

Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi was the queen of the Maratha-ruled princely state of Jhansi, situated in the north-central part of India. She was one of the leading figures of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and for Indian nationalists a symbol...

Saigo Takamori was one of the most influential samurai in Japanese history, living during the late Edo Period and early Meiji Era. He has been dubbed the last true samurai. He was born Saigo Kokichi, and received the given name Takamori in...

Mathilde Wesendonck was a German poet and author. She is best known as the friend and possibly mistress of Richard Wagner, who set five songs to her words, called the Wesendonck Lieder. By 1857, Wagner had become infatuated with Mathilde. I...

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the...

Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in the little village of Skien. After a brief flirtation with poetic drama, he would go on to become Norway's most famous playwright, changing the face of world drama with his rea...

Henri Dunant, the man whose vision led to the creation of the worldwide Red Cross and Red Crescent movement; he went from riches to rags but became joint recipient of the first Nobel peace prize. Present at the end of the battle of Solfe...

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the...