Ernst Werner von Siemens was a German inventor and industrialist. He is world known for his advances in various technologies, and chose to work on perfecting technologies that have already been established. Siemens invented a telegraph that...

Buys Ballot was a Dutch chemist and meteorologist after whom Buys-Ballot's law and the Buys Ballot table are named. Buys Ballot tested the Doppler effect for sound waves in 1845 by using a group of musicians playing a calibrated note on...

William III was King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg from 1849 until his death in 1890. He was also the Duke of Limburg from 1849 until the abolition of the duchy in 1866. William was the son of King William II and Anna P...

Sir Austen Henry Layard was an English traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician and diplomat. He is best known as the excavator of Nimrud and of Nineveh, where he uncovered a large proportion...

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend. He was Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, for...

Modern readers must jump through a number of hoops to enjoy this legendary novel. Written between 1816 and 1818, this is very much a novel of its era, and both language and ideas about plot are quite different from those of today. That asid...

Tewodros II was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1855 until his death in 1868. He was born Kassa Hailegiorgis (English: "restitution" and "His [or the] power"). His rule is often placed as the beginning of modern Ethiopia, ending the decentralized...

Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen was a German chess master. He is considered to have been the world's leading chess player for much of the 1850s and 1860s. He was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired...

Alexander II was the Emperor (tsar) of Russia from 1855 until his assassination. He was also the Grand Duke of Finland. He was born the eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia and Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William III of Prussi...

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has in...

James Prescott Joule was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work. This led to the law of conservation of energy, which led to the dev...

Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood...

Ivanhoe was the first of Scott's novels to take place in the middle ages but it is far from being the fantastic, medievalist romance associated (in the critical imagination) with a visionary Britain that never was. This is the first novel i...

A short story by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle tells the tale of a lazy old man who falls asleep for twenty years and returns to his village to find that the world has changed drastically during his absence and that nearly everyone he k...

Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, later The Prince Consort was the husband of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was born in the Saxon duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to a family connected to many o...