Duke Kahanamoku, known as the "Big Kahuna," was an Olympic champion swimmer who is generally credited with having invented the modern sport of surfing. He was the first person to be inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Surfi...

Sir William Lawrence Bragg was an Australian-born British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient (with h...

Sir Charles Edward Kingsford Smith, often called by his nickname Smithy, was an early Australian aviator. In 1928, he earned global fame when he made the first trans-Pacific flight from the United States to Australia. He also made the first...

Amy Johnson CBE was a pioneering English aviatrix. Flying solo or with her husband, Jim Mollison, Johnson set numerous long-distance records during the 1930s. Johnson flew in the Second World War as a part of the Air Transport Auxiliary whe...

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, was a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer. On 29 May 1953 at the age of 33, he and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part o...

Rupert Murdoch, Australian-American publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch established News Corporation as a holding company in 1980; it has since developed into a worldwide communications empire. Included among the many assets of Murdoch's News...

The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese E...

Sir Peter Robert Jackson ONZ KNZM is a New Zealand film director, screenwriter and film producer. He is best known as the director, writer, and producer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03) and The Hobbit trilogy (2012–14), both of wh...

Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician who is the 44th President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office and the first president born outside the continental United States. Born in Honolulu, Hawa...