John Frank Stevens was an American engineer who built the Great Northern Railway in the United States and was chief engineer on the Panama Canal between 1905 and 1907. Stevens resigned suddenly from the Canal project in 1907 to Roosevelt's...

Salomon August Andrée, during his lifetime most often known as S. A. Andrée, was a Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and polar explorer who died while leading an attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole by hydrogen balloon. The balloo...

Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Among Wilde's other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gr...

Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff was a Russian neuropsychiatrist, known for his studies on alcoholic psychosis. His name is lent to the eponymous Korsakoff's syndrome and Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome. Korsakoff was one of the greatest neurop...

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it...

Cornelis Lely was a Dutch civil engineer and statesman. He was the figure responsible for the Zuiderzee Works, which meant the enclosure of the Zuiderzee by means of the Afsluitdijk, and subsequently draining parts of it into polders. All t...

Aletta Jacobs was the first woman in Dutch history to be officially admitted to university. This took place in 1871. As a schoolgirl she had written a letter to Prime Minister Thorbecke requesting permission to be allowed to attend “academi...

George Eastman was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented roll film, helping to bring photography to the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in...

Ned Kelley is Australia's most famous bushranger and, to many, a folk hero for his defiance of the colonial authorities. From the age of fourteen, Ned began committing a series of minor crimes that escalated into more serious crimes and eve...

The Second Opium War, the Second Anglo-Chinese War, the Second China War, the Arrow War, or the Anglo-French expedition to China, was a war pitting the British Empire and the Second French Empire against the Qing Dynasty of China, lasting f...

Booker Taliaferro Washington was an African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. Washington was of...

Prof Cargill Gilston Knott was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was a pioneer in seismological research. He spent his early career in Japan. He later became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburg...

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth President of the United States (1856-1924). A devout Presbyterian, and leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, he served as President of Princeton University and then became the Governor of N...

John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as...

Hendrik Petrus Berlage was a prominent Dutch architect. Berlage was born in Amsterdam. He studied architecture at the Zurich Institute of Technology between 1875 and 1878 after which he traveled extensively for 3 years through Europe. In...