Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote bot...

Henri Nestlé was a German-born Swiss confectioner and the founder of Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage company, as well as one of the main creators of condensed milk. Before Nestlé turned 22 in 1836, he had completed a four-y...

Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, was one of the most prominent European aristocrats and statesmen of the nineteenth century. As Prime Minister of Prussia from 1862 to 1890, he engineered the unification of the num...

Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen was a German chess master. He is considered to have been the world's leading chess player for much of the 1850s and 1860s. He was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired...

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has in...

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later The Prince Consort was the husband of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was born in the Saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to a family connected to many o...

Jacques Offenbach is best known for his opera Les contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffmann) and for a work he did not compose, Gaîté parisienne, which used his themes as assembled and arranged by Manuel Rosenthal. Offenbach was one of those popu...

Marcus Goldman (December 9, 1821 – July 20, 1904) was a German-born American businessman and entrepreneur. He was born in Trappstadt, Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1848. He was the founder of Goldman Sachs, which is now one...

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...

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term black-body radiation in...

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...

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...

Levi Strauss was a German-American businessman who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm, Levi Strauss & Co., began in 1853 in San Francisco, California. At the age of 18, Strauss, his mother and two sisters trave...

Frederick III was German Emperor and King of Prussia, ruling for 99 days until his death in 1888. He was the son and successor of William I. In 1858 he married Victoria, the princess royal of England, who exerted considerable influence over...

Nikolaus August Otto was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented (e.g. by Étienne Lenoir) these were not...