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.
Failed his teaching exams twice, counted 28,000 pea plants and founded genetics without anyone noticing
A farmer's son who joined a monastery to afford an education, he worked out the laws of inheritance in an abbey garden. His paper was ignored for 34…
Sat alone outside the Swedish parliament at 15 and started a global movement of school strikes
A quiet, autistic schoolgirl who stopped eating and speaking for months over the climate, she skipped school to protest alone in August 2018. Within…
Solved a hundred-year-old problem, then turned down every prize offered for it
A reclusive Russian mathematician who proved the Poincaré conjecture, one of mathematics' hardest unsolved problems, then declined the Fields Medal…
Turned down by his own government, he took his radio to Britain and sent a signal across the Atlantic
A poorly educated young man experimenting in his father's attic, he built the first practical wireless telegraph and, in 1901, claimed to have picked…
A Mexican teenager who built a television camera from scrap and patented colour TV at 23
Working at a Mexico City radio station while still a student, he built his own television equipment from junk and in 1940 patented a colour system…
The maintenance man whose homemade toy caught the boss's eye, and who went on to design the Game Boy
Hired to keep the card-making machines running at Nintendo, he was spotted playing with an extending toy arm he had built. He created the Game &…
Ran 10 kilometres to school and back every day, then broke 27 world records
One of ten children on a farm in Ethiopia, he became a double Olympic champion and marathon world record holder, and returned home to build…
A Kurdish shepherd's son who bought a shuttered yoghurt plant and staffed it with refugees
Born to a Kurdish farming family in Turkey, he arrived in the United States speaking little English, bought a closed yoghurt factory with a small…
Typed with two ballpoint pens when her hands failed, then became Korea's first Nobel laureate in literature
A quiet novelist from Gwangju who wrote about violence, grief and the body, she was blacklisted by her own government, then in 2024 became the first…
A Greenlandic hunter who kept five different Arctic expeditions fed and alive, then wrote it down
A Greenlandic hunter recruited as a teenager, he served on four major nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions as hunter and dog-driver, and left one of…
From a village with one literate family to the man who helped crack the genetic code
He learned to read under a tree because his village had no school building, and forty years later showed how three letters of DNA spell out one amino…
Failed at a dozen jobs and started franchising fried chicken at 65 with a pension cheque
Fired from job after job, he was running a roadside café in Kentucky when a new highway bypassed it and wiped him out. At an age when most people…
Escaped slavery and then went back, again and again, to lead others out
She freed herself in 1849 and made around 13 return trips into slave-holding territory, guiding some 70 people to freedom without ever losing one. In…
One of the first openly gay elected officials in America, shot dead after eleven months in office
A closeted New York businessman until his forties, he moved to San Francisco, ran for office three times and lost, then won, helped defeat an…
Turned her family farm into a refuge for 90,000 people through Somalia's civil war
One of Somalia's first female gynaecologists, she opened a one-room clinic on her land in 1983. When the state collapsed it became a camp, hospital…
Hollywood star who patented a torpedo guidance system that lies behind Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
Trapped in a marriage to an arms dealer, she fled Austria in 1937 and became a film star. In her spare time she invented frequency hopping, dismissed…
Crossed the Sahara for five years, alone after his companions died, and mapped half a continent
A German scholar who outlived every other European on a British-sponsored mission, spending five years crossing the Sahara and West and Central…
Went to Belsen at 20, and sixty years later was still sitting with survivors of torture
A young Jewish Londoner who volunteered for the liberated camps in 1945, she spent the rest of her life with the damaged, founding the Medical…
Deaf and blind from infancy, she spent fifty years lobbying, fundraising and arguing for the rights of others
The famous childhood story ends where her real work began: decades of campaigning for blind people, workers, women's suffrage and civil liberties, in…
Heard a radio advert on the way home from a chocolate factory and became the first Briton in space
A chemist from Sheffield working for Mars confectionery, she beat 13,000 applicants, trained for eighteen months in Star City and flew to the Mir…
Left Kraków with a suitcase of face cream jars and built one of the first global cosmetics empires
Fleeing an arranged marriage in Poland with little money, she sold a face cream made by a family friend to Australian sheep farmers' wives, then…
Left bedridden by cancer surgery at 71, he picked up scissors and began what he called his second life
A law clerk who discovered painting during a long illness at 20, was mocked as a wild beast, and when he could no longer stand at an easel invented a…
A deaf, underpaid "computer" who gave astronomers a ruler for the universe
Hired to measure star brightnesses on glass plates for thirty cents an hour, she noticed a pattern in pulsing stars that let others measure the size…
Cromer's crab fisherman who went out in the lifeboat for 53 years and saved 873 lives
Coxswain of the Cromer lifeboat from 1909 to 1947, he took part in 387 launches and won the RNLI gold medal three times and the George Cross, while…
