John Tyler, 10th President of the United States (1841-1845), signaled the last gasp of the Old Virginia aristocracy in the White House. Born a few years after the American Revolution in 1790 to an old family from Virginia's ruling class, Ty...

Leopold I was a German prince who became the first King of the Belgians following the country's independence in 1830. He reigned between July 1831 and December 1865. Born into the ruling family of the small German duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Sa...

Colonel Sir George Everest was a Welsh surveyor, geographer and Surveyor-General of India from 1830 to 1843. Sir George was largely responsible for completing the section of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India along the meridian arc fro...

August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. He is best known for his discovery of the Möbius strip, a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean...

The Reverend Dr Robert Stirling was a Scottish clergyman, and inventor of the stirling engine. He invented what he called the Heat Economiser (now generally known as the regenerator), a device for improving the thermal/fuel efficiency of a...

Marie Louise, Empress of the French (1810–1815) as consort of Napoleon I and duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla (1816–47), daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II (later Emperor of Austria as Francis I.) She was married (1810) to N...

Count István Széchenyi was a Hungarian politician, theorist and writer, one of the greatest statesmen of Hungarian history. An important Széchenyi initiative was the development of Buda and Pest as a major political, economical and cultural...

Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew...

James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States (1857-1861). In the 1850s, the question of slavery divided the United States. Hopes ran high that the new President, "Old Buck," might be the man to avert national crisis. He failed entire...

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and (proto-) computer scientist who originated the idea of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London S...

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American painter and inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegra...

The major powers of Europe - Austria, Britain, Russia and Prussia - feared the rise of France's revolutionaries because of the effect they could have upon their own populations. They banded together in various combinations and coalitions th...

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some as among the finest lyric poets in the English language, and one of the most influential. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and soci...

Alexander Ypsilantis was a member of a prominent Phanariot Greek family, a prince of the Danubian Principalities, a senior officer of the Imperial Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars, and a leader of the Filiki Eteria, a secret organ...

Francisco José de Paula Santander y Omaña was a Colombian military and political leader during the 1810–1819 independence war of the United Provinces of New Granada (present-day Colombia). He was the acting President of Gran Colombia betwee...