Hector Malot, writer of children's stories, whose novel Sans famille (Nobody's Boy, 1878) is one of the great popular classics of French culture. The moral and didactic adventure story of the boy Rémi, a foundling who goes in search of his...

Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, and monarch of other states in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 2 December 1848 to his death. From 1 May 1850 to 24 August 1866 he was also President of the German...

The Xianfeng Emperor, or by temple name Emperor Wenzong of Qing, given name Yizhu, was the eighth Emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the seventh Qing emperor to rule over China proper, reigned from 1850 to 1861. During his reign the Qing dyna...

James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish mathematical physicist. His most notable achievement was to formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as manifestat...

James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States (1881), is remembered as one of the four "lost Presidents" who served rather uneventfully after the Civil War. Of the four lost Presidents -- Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison -- Ga...

Frederick III was German Emperor and King of Prussia, ruling for 99 days until his death in 1888. He was the son and successor of William I. In 1858 he married Victoria, the princess royal of England, who exerted considerable influence over...

John Stith Pemberton was an American pharmacist who is best known for being the founder of Coca-Cola. In May 1886, he developed an early version of a beverage that would later become world-famous as Coca-Cola, but sold his rights to the dri...

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a Russian occultist/esoteric philosopher, and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy, the esoteric religion that t...

Paul Belloni du Chaillu was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched th...

Eduard Suess was a geologist who was an expert on the geography of the Alps. He is responsible for discovering two of the Earth's major now-lost geographical features, the supercontinent Gondwana (proposed 1861) and the Tethys Ocean. Sue...

Hendrik Willem Mesdag was a Dutch marine painter. He was born in Groningen, the son of the banker Klaas Mesdag and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina van Giffen. Mesdag was encouraged by his father, an amateur painter, to study art. He married...

Maximilian I was the only monarch of the Second Mexican Empire. After a distinguished career in the Austrian Navy, he was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico on April 10, 1864, with the backing of Napoleon III of France and a group of Mexican mona...

Édouard Manet was a French painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner su...

Nikolaus August Otto was the German inventor of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber. Although other internal combustion engines had been invented (e.g. by Étienne Lenoir) these were not...

The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its s...