Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was an Irish-born British Field Marshal and proconsul who won fame for his imperial campaigns and later played a central role in the early part of the First World War, although he...

César Ritz was a famous Swiss hotelier and founder of several hotels, most famously the Hôtel Ritz, in Paris and The Ritz Hotel in London. His nickname was "king of hoteliers, and hotelier to kings," and it is from his name and that of his...

Sir Arthur John Evans was a British archaeologist most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete at Kephala Hill and for developing the concept of "Minoan civilization" from the structures and artifacts there...

Antoine Henri Becquerel was a physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit f...

Emperor Meiji or Meiji the Great was the 122nd Emperor of Japan according to the traditional order of succession, reigning from February 3, 1867 until his death on July 30, 1912. He presided over a time of rapid change in the Empire of Japa...

Antoni Gaudí i Cornet was an architect from Reus, Catalonia, Spain. He is the best known practitioner of Catalan Modernism. Gaudí's works have a highly individualized, and one-of-a-kind style. Most are located in Barcelona, including his ma...

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist. His scientific career was spent exploring extremely cold refrigeration techniques and the associated phenomena. In 1908, he was the first physicist to liquify helium, using cryostats. Using the...

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and elucidation of the Zeeman effect. Lorentz studied physics and mathematics at the University of Leiden, where...

André Jules Michelin was a French industrialist who, with his brother Édouard (1859–1940), founded the Michelin Tyre Company (Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin) in 1888 in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. In 1900, André...

John Frank Stevens was an American engineer who built the Great Northern Railway in the United States and was chief engineer on the Panama Canal between 1905 and 1907. Stevens resigned suddenly from the Canal project in 1907 to Roosevelt's...

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it...

Booker Taliaferro Washington was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. Washington was of...

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth President of the United States (1856-1924). A devout Presbyterian, and leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, he served as President of Princeton University and then became the Governor of N...

John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as...

Hendrik Petrus Berlage was a prominent Dutch architect. Berlage was born in Amsterdam. He studied architecture at the Zurich Institute of Technology between 1875 and 1878 after which he traveled extensively for 3 years through Europe. In...