Otto Lilienthal was a German pioneer of human aviation who became known as the Glider King. He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful gliding flights. He followed an experimental approach established earlier by S...

Daniel Elmer Salmon was a veterinary surgeon. He earned the first D.V.M. degree awarded in the United States, and spent his career studying animal diseases for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He gave his name to the Salmonella genus of...

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...

Charles Henry Dow was an American journalist who co-founded Dow Jones & Company with Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser. Dow also founded The Wall Street Journal, which has become one of the most respected financial publications in the w...

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...

Salomon August Andrée, during his lifetime most often known as S. A. Andrée, was a Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and polar explorer who died while leading an attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole by hydrogen balloon. The balloo...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, famous for the invention of the diesel engine. Diesel engines are most often found in applications where a high torque requirement and low RPM requirement exist....

Georges Méliès was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects. He accidentally discovered the stop trick, or substitution, in...

The Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis, were among the earliest filmmakers. (Appropriately, "lumière" translates as "light" in English.) Their father, Charles Antoine Lumière (1840-1911), ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for...

Sir Frederick Henry Royce, 1st Baronet was a pioneering car manufacturer, who with Charles Stewart Rolls founded the Rolls-Royce company. With his fascination for all things mechanical he became interested in motor cars and bought first, in...

Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a Russian actor and theatre director. His innovative contribution to modern European and American realistic acting has remained at the core of mainstream western performance training for much of the l...

Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Although Ford did not invent the automobile or the assembly line, he deve...

William Randolph Hearst was an American newspaper magnate. Hearst was a leading newspaper publisher. The son of self-made millionaire George Hearst, he became aware that his father had received a northern California newspaper, The San Franc...