Johan Rudolf Thorbecke was one of the most important Dutch politicians. In 1848, he virtually singlehandedly drafted the revision of the Dutch constitution, giving fewer powers to the king, and more to the parliament. Thorbecke was born...

Charles Goodyear was the inventor of vulcanization, a process that makes rubber harder, less soluble, and more durable. It is at the heart of rubber compounding, which played a key role at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Goodyear ob...

Born into desperate poverty at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Millard Fillmore, 13th US President (1850-1853), climbed to the highest office in the land -- and inherited a nation breaking into fragments over the question of slavery. De...

Joseph Smith, Jr. was the American religious figure who founded the Latter Day Saint movement, also known as Mormonism. Smith's followers declared him to be the first latter-day prophet, whose mission was to restore the original Christian c...

Robert Edward Lee was an American general known for commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War from 1862 until his surrender in 1865. A son of Revolutionary War officer Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III,...

Andrew Johnson, 17th President of the United States (1865-1869), gives truth to the saying that in America, anyone can grow up to become President. Born in a log cabin in North Carolina to nearly illiterate parents, Andrew Johnson did not m...

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the Unit...

Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor of a system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains virtually unchanged to this day, and is known worldwide simply as braille. Blinded in both...

Kit Carson was an American frontiersman. He was a mountain man (fur trapper), wilderness guide, Indian agent, and U.S. Army officer. Carson became a frontier legend in his own lifetime via biographies and news articles. Exaggerated versions...

William Ewart Gladstone was a British Liberal Party statesman and four times Prime Minister (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886 and 1892–94). He was a champion of the Home Rule Bill which would have established self-government in Ireland. Gladstone...

Sir Henry Bessemer was an English engineer, inventor, and businessman. Bessemer's name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel. Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for th...

Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman and a pioneer in the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now presumed to be the sit...

Louis Pasteur was a French biologist, microbiologist and chemist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and p...

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly publi...

William John Wills was an English surveyor who also trained for a while as a surgeon. He achieved fame as the second-in-command of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, which was the first expedition to cross Australia from south to nor...