Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
A Russian priest who rowed oceans, sailed the globe five times, and circled it by balloon in eleven days
An Orthodox priest and lifelong adventurer who has rowed solo across oceans, sailed around the world five times, and in 2016 flew nonstop around the…
Pawned the heater and the mixer to finish a novel, then could only afford to post half of it
A journalist who shut himself away for eighteen months while his wife ran up debts with the butcher, he emerged with One Hundred Years of Solitude…
Helped bring an affordable rotavirus vaccine to the children who needed it most
A virologist who spent decades studying the diarrheal diseases that kill children across India, work that helped produce a low-cost rotavirus vaccine…
Captained Wales and the Lions while hiding who he was, then became the first openly gay rugby player
A Welsh rugby legend who came out in 2009 after years of fear, and ten years later, facing a tabloid threat, told the world he was living with HIV…
Invented the gas mask and the traffic light, and walked into a poisoned tunnel to save lives
The son of formerly enslaved parents in Kentucky, he worked as a handyman, taught himself to fix sewing machines and patented a safety hood that he…
Led 27 village women to stand between the loggers and the trees of Reni, and the loggers left
A widow who could not read, she led the women of a Himalayan village to block the felling of their forest in 1974 while the men had been called away.…
Blind from the age of three, he reads the history of life in the shapes of seashells by touch
A Dutch immigrant child who was handed a shell in a fourth-grade classroom and never put it down. His fingers noticed things sighted biologists had…
Took over a failing cocoa firm at 21 and built Bournville, a factory in a garden
He and his brother took on a business close to collapse and lived on almost nothing to save it. When it prospered he moved the works out of…
Shot through the throat in Spain, he typed Nineteen Eighty-Four in bed on Jura as tuberculosis killed him
He washed dishes in Paris, slept rough in London and fought fascism in Spain before his two most famous books were written, one rejected by every…
Could not read until he was 18 and went on to build the first passenger railways
The son of a colliery fireman, he had no schooling at all until he paid for night classes as a young man. He built the Stockton and Darlington and…
Born into slavery, kidnapped as a baby, he taught the American South how to feed itself
Turned away from one college on arrival because he was Black, he became the first Black student at another and spent 47 years teaching poor farmers…
Mapped Arabia for the British Empire, then helped draw the borders of a country still living with them
A British traveller and archaeologist who mapped and wrote about the Ottoman Middle East for years, then used that knowledge to help draw the borders…
The first woman to swim the English Channel, nearly two hours faster than any man before her
A butcher's daughter from Manhattan with damaged hearing, she failed on her first attempt at the Channel in 1925, then crossed in 1926 in a time that…
A transplant surgeon who spent thirty years in war zones and built a free heart hospital in Sudan
An Italian surgeon who left transplant medicine to operate on the wounded of Afghanistan, Rwanda and Iraq, founded the charity Emergency in 1994 and…
A London parlourmaid rejected by the missions who led a hundred children across the mountains of China
Failed by the mission society, she saved her wages and crossed Siberia alone to reach a remote Chinese town, where she ran an inn, freed girls' feet…
A sharecropper's daughter whose model of the Earth's shape made satellite navigation possible
She worked her way off the farm through a scholarship, spent 42 years computing satellite orbits at a naval base, and produced the precise model of…
A farm boy with no degree who invented the CT scanner and tested it on a pig's head from the butcher
Not academic at school, he learned electronics in the RAF and joined the record company EMI, where a walk in the country gave him the idea of…
Retired at 58 with crippled hands and built an eye hospital that treats the poor for nothing
Rheumatoid arthritis ended his career as an obstetrician, so he learned to hold a cataract knife with deformed fingers. In 1976 he opened an…
Turned her own country's war into a landmark UN report on children under fire
A former guerrilla fighter and Mozambique's first education minister, she wrote the 1996 UN study that first measured the toll of war on children,…
Rowed out with her father into a storm at 22, saved nine people and hated the fame that followed
A lighthouse keeper's daughter on the Farne Islands who spotted survivors of the wrecked steamer Forfarshire in September 1838 and helped her father…
Wrote the first compiler and made computers speak something like English
A maths professor who joined the Navy at 34, she invented the idea that programs could be written in words rather than numbers, and kept serving…
Watched his deaf father struggle and spent decades building the bionic ear others called impossible
An ear surgeon who was told that stimulating the hearing nerve with electrodes could never produce speech, he funded his research through telethons…
A farmer’s widow who took up painting at 78 and was famous by 80
Anna Mary Robertson Moses left home at 12 to work as a hired girl, raised a family on farms and only began painting in her late seventies when…
Shot in a hunting accident, he came back to win the Tour de France by eight seconds
The first American to win the Tour de France, he was shot by his brother-in-law a year later and lost two seasons, then won the 1989 race in the…
