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...

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter and theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurat...

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a libe...

Alberto Santos-Dumont was an early pioneer of aviation. He was born and died in Brazil. Heir of a prosperous coffee producer family, Santos-Dumont dedicated himself to science studies in Paris. Santos-Dumont designed, built, and flew the...

Mehmed Talat Pasha was one of leaders of the Young Turks, an Ottoman statesman, grand vizier (1917) , and leading member of the Sublime Porte from 1913 until 1918. He is infamously tied to the Armenian Genocide possibly even more than the o...

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was a polar explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic, and one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Born in Kilkea, Athy, County Kildare, Irel...

Harry Houdini was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomen...

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was a Jewish Austrian composer, music theorist, and painter. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. By 1938, with the rise of the...

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work...

Herbert Clark Hoover, the 31st President of the United States (1929-1933), was a world-famous mining engineer and humanitarian administrator before turning to political administration. A Republican, he defeated Democrat Alfred E. Smith in t...

Winston Churchill was a politician, a soldier, an artist, and the 20th century's most famous and celebrated Prime Minister. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, a Nineteenth Century Tory politician. He was educated at Harrow and at Sandh...

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was a prolific British crime writer, journalist and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and countless articles in newspapers and journals. Over 160 films have been made of his novels, more than any othe...

Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a, best known for his orchestral work, Boléro, and his famous 1922 orchestral arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. He himself had described Boléro as "a piece for orchestra without music". R...

John Buchan is most famous for The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle, and his thrillers and short stories are all in print today. The list of his published books is well over a hundred in number, and only about 40 of these are fiction....

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best remembered as the creator of the world famous character of Tarzan, one of the indispensable icons of popular culture. Burroughs also published science fiction and crime novels. In 1912 Burroughs's breakthrough n...