David Livingstone was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary and an explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Perhaps one of the most popular nat...

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote bot...

John Rae was a Scottish doctor who explored Northern Canada, surveyed parts of the Northwest Passage and reported the fate of the Franklin Expedition. Rae was born at the Hall of Clestrain in the parish of Orphir in Orkney. After studyi...

Sir Henry Bessemer was an English engineer, inventor, and businessman. Bessemer's name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel. Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for th...

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian opera composer. Verdi was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian...

Samuel Colt was an American inventor and industrialist from Hartford, Connecticut. He founded Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (today, Colt's Manufacturing Company), and made the mass production of the revolver commercially via...

Henri Nestlé was a German-born Swiss confectioner and the founder of Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage company, as well as one of the main creators of condensed milk. Before Nestlé turned 22 in 1836, he had completed a four-y...

Antoine-Joseph (known as Adolphe) Sax was a Belgian musical instrument designer, best known for inventing the saxophone. Having left school, Sax began to experiment with new instrument designs. In 1841, Sax relocated permanently to Paris an...

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by the armies of the Seventh Coali...

Mount Tambora (or Tomboro) is an active stratovolcano, also known as a composite volcano, on Sumbawa island, Indonesia. Tambora erupted in 1815 with a rating of seven on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, making it the largest eruption since t...

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the An...

Andrew Jackson Downing was an American landscape designer, horticulturist, and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival in the United States, and editor of The Horticulturist magazine (1846–52). Downing is considered to be a found...

George Boole was an English mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854) which contains Boolean algeb...

Otto, King of Greece was made the first modern king of Greece in 1832 under the Convention of London, whereby Greece became a new independent kingdom under the protection of the Great Powers (the United Kingdom, France and the Russian Empir...

Thomas Austin was an English settler in Australia who is generally noted for the introduction of rabbits into Australia in 1859. As a member of the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, Thomas Austin helped to introduce many species from...