The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900–1901 from the Antikythera wreck. Its significance and complexity were not understood until decades later. Its...

The Right Honourable William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, GCVO, OM, PC, PRS was a Scottish-Irish mathematical physicist and engineer, an outstanding leader in the physical sciences of the 19th century. Kelvin is known especially for his work...

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...

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...

Eadweard Muybridge is often called the father of the motion picture because of his photographic studies of animal motion. He began his career as a landscape photographer, and always considered himself more an artist than a scientist, altho...

Eduard Suess was a geologist who was an expert on the geography of the Alps. He is responsible for discovering two of the Earth's major now-lost geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana (proposed 1861) and the Tethys Ocean. Sue...

Ernst Haeckel was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms...

The Dowager Empress Cixi popularly known in China as the Western Empress Dowager, and officially known posthumously as Empress Xiaoqin Xian, was a powerful and charismatic figure who was the de facto ruler of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, rulin...

Leopold Louis-Philippe Marie Victor of Saxe-Coburg, succeeded his father, Leopold I of Belgium, to the Belgian throne in 1865 as Leopold II, King of the Belgians and remained king until his death. Outside of Belgium, however, he is chiefly...

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He was also one of the highest profile philanthropists of his era and had given away almost 90 per...

Abraham Kuijper generally known as Abraham Kuyper, was a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman and theologian. He founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party and was prime minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905....

Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, German army officer and airship inventor and builder. He entered the Prussian army in 1858 and served in the Seven Weeks War and in the Franco-Prussian War. He was an observer with the Union army during the Amer...

Josiah Willard Gibbs was an American theoretical physicist, chemist, and mathematician. He devised much of the theoretical foundation for chemical thermodynamics as well as physical chemistry. As a mathematician, he invented vector analysis...

John Davison Rockefeller, Sr. was an American industrialist who played a prominent role in the early oil industry with the founding of Standard Oil (ExxonMobil is the largest of its descendants). Over a forty-year period, Rockefeller built...

Auguste-René Rodin, French sculptor and draughtsman. He is the only sculptor of the modern age regarded in his lifetime and afterwards to be on a par with Michelangelo. Both made images with widespread popular appeal, and both stressed the...