Jacobus Johannes "Jaap" Eden was a Dutch athlete. He is the only male athlete to have won world championships in both speed skating and cycling (women who have done so are Sheila Young and Christa Rothenburger)....

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...

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov, one of the most famous of Russian composers. Rachmaninov's music is considered Romantic while bearing traces of typically Russian themes and style of composition. Although banned in Soviet Russia for more tha...

Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is, in my opinion, one of, if not the, greatest musical works in history. It is fifteen hours of gorgeous, dramatic music, coupled to an endlessly fascinating and moving story. Needless to say, every recordi...

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...

Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. In the post-World War I years, Lowell was largely forgotten, but the women's moveme...

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...

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor, best known for his development of a radio telegraph system, which served as the foundation for the establishment of numerous affiliated companies worldwide. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physic...

Howard Carter was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist, noted as a primary discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. In 1891, at the age of 17, Carter, a talented young artist, was sent out to Egypt by the Egypt Exploration Fund t...

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...