Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for the solo piano. He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as a leading musician of his era, whose "poetic genius was based o...

In 1834 Schumann founded a music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; he was its editor and leading writer for ten years. He was a brilliant and perceptive critic: his writings embody the most progressive aspects of musical thinking in...

Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, was a leading figure in the movement toward Italian unification. He was the founder of the original Italian Liberal Party and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, a position he maintained (exce...

Edward Blyth was an English zoologist and pharmacist. He was one of the founders of zoology in India. Blyth was born in London in 1810. In 1841 he travelled to India to become the curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal...

Howard Staunton was an English chess master who is generally regarded as having been the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851, largely as a result of his 1843 victory over Saint-Amant. He promoted a chess set of clearly distinguishabl...

James Wilson Marshall was an American carpenter and sawmill operator, whose discovery of gold in the American River in California on January 24, 1848 set the stage for the California Gold Rush. The mill property was owned by Johan (John) Su...

Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, 1st Baronet GCB was an English soldier, diplomat and orientalist. He is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Assyriology." Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until 1835 when Henry Rawlinson, a British East Ind...

William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong CB, FRS was an effective Tyneside industrialist who founded the Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing empire. Armstrong was responsible for developing the hydraulic accumulator. Where water press...

The Peruvian War of Independence was a series of military conflicts beginning in 1811 that culminated in the proclamation of the independence of Peru by José de San Martín on July 28, 1821. During the previous decade Peru had been a strongh...

Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, Prince Imperial, King of Rome, known in the Austrian court as Franz from 1814 onward, Duke of Reichstadt from 1818, was the son of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and his second wife, Archduche...

Elisha Graves Otis was an American industrialist, founder of the Otis Elevator Company, and inventor of a safety device that prevents elevators from falling if the hoisting cable fails. At the age of 40, while he was cleaning up the fact...

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was a French mathematician who, beginning in 1838, studied the causes of perturbations in the Solar System. His work led to improved knowledge of the masses of the planets, the scale of the Solar System, and th...

Jón Sigurðsson was the leader of the 19th century Icelandic independence movement. Born at Hrafnseyri, near Arnarfjörður in the Westfjords area of Iceland, he was the son of a pastor, Sigurður Jónsson. He moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, in 18...

August Gottfried Ritter was a German romantic composer and organist. Co-creator, together with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, of the first example of Romantic Organ Sonata (the first one was composed in 1845); he moved in 1847 from being orga...

Franz Liszt was a prolific 19th-century Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, organist, philanthropist, author, nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nin...