Paul Belloni du Chaillu was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched th...

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...

Hendrik Willem Mesdag was a Dutch marine painter. He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his father, an amateur painter, to study art. He married...

Maximilian I was the only monarch of the Second Mexican Empire. After a distinguished career in the Austrian Navy, he was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico on April 10, 1864, with the backing of Napoleon III of France and a group of Mexican mona...

Édouard Manet was a French painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner su...

Nikolaus August Otto was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented (e.g. by Étienne Lenoir) these were not...

The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its s...

Baron (Nils) Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld also known as A. E. Nordenskioeld was a Finnish-Swede geologist, mineralogist and arctic explorer, and a member of the prominent Finland-Swedish Nordenskiöld family of scientists. Born in the Grand Duchy...

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French civil engineer. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, he made his name with various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the Garabit viaduct. He is best known for the world-famous Eiffel...

The Carlist Wars in Spain were the last major European civil wars in which contenders fought to establish their claim to a throne. Several times during the period from 1833 to 1876 the Carlists — followers of Infante Carlos (later Carlos V)...

Major-General Charles George Gordon, CB, also known as Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British army officer and administrator. He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British army, but he made hi...

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. Known for inventing dynamite, Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel produc...

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor...

Benjamin Harrison was the twenty-third President of the United States, serving one term from 1889 to 1893. Harrison was born in North Bend, Ohio, and at age 21 moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where he became a prominent state politician. Du...

Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen was a German traveller, geographer, and scientist. He traveled or studied in the Alps of Tyrol and the Carpathians in Transylvania. In 1860, he joined the Eulenburg Expedition, a Prussian expedition which...