Sir Henry Alexander Wickham was a British explorer. He later claimed in publicity that he was responsible for stealing about 70,000 seeds from the rubber-bearing tree, Hevea brasiliensis, in the Santarém area of Brazil in 1876. However ther...

Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent Scottish-born scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone. Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elo...

Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life in the 20th century. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply...

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...

José Julián Martí Pérez was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as a renowned poet and writer. Active in the Cuban independence movement from boyhood, he was deported to Spain in 1871, returning in 1878. Exiled again for con...

Aletta Jacobs was the first woman in Dutch history to be officially admitted to university. This took place in 1871. As a schoolgirl she had written a letter to Prime Minister Thorbecke requesting permission to be allowed to attend “academi...

In 1897 in Cambridge, J J Thomson experimented on cathode rays. In Britain, physicists had argued these rays were particles, but German physicists disagreed, thinking they were a type of electromagnetic radiation. Thomson showed that cathod...

Georges Albert Édouard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette was a French physician and the eponym of Tourette syndrome, a neurological condition. He could be retrospectively classified as a neurologist, but the field did not exist in his time. T...

Sir Marc Aurel Stein KCIE, FBA, was a Hungarian archaeologist, mainly concerned with exploring ancient Central Asia. He was also a professor at various Indian universities. Stein was influenced by Sven Hedin's 1898 work, Through Asia. He m...

Ludwig Borchardt was a German Egyptologist who was born in Berlin. His main focus was Ancient Egyptian architecture. He began excavations in Amarna, where he discovered the workshop of the sculptor Djhutmose, amongst its contents was the bu...

Colonel Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was a British Indian Army officer who, as a temporary Brigadier general, was responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar (in the British Indian province of Punjab). Dyer was removed from duty...

Matthew Alexander Henson was an American explorer and associate of Robert Peary during various expeditions, the most famous being a 1909 expedition which claimed to be the first to reach the Geographic North Pole. Henson met Commander Ro...

Marie Sklodowska Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person...

The Wright brothers, Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur (1867–1912), were two American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who are credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled...

Louis Blériot was a French aviator, inventor and engineer. In 1909 he completed the first flight across a large body of water in a heavier-than-air craft when he crossed the English Channel, receiving a prize of 1000 British pounds for doin...