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.
The son of an enslaved woman who arrived in America with little English and mechanised the making of shoes
Working in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, he spent years building a machine to do the one job that skilled hand workers said no machine…
Grew up without running water in Soviet Ukraine and once relied on food stamps before founding WhatsApp
He emigrated from a village outside Kyiv at sixteen, worked as a school janitor to help support his family, taught himself computer networking from…
Bred sweeter sugarcane for India, mapped the chromosomes of garden plants, and fought to save a rainforest
A woman from Kerala who chose botany over marriage at a time when neither her caste nor her sex made that easy, worked in England through the war,…
Opened Hull House in a Chicago slum and lived there for the rest of her life
After years of illness and aimlessness she moved into an immigrant district of Chicago and founded a settlement house that offered nurseries, classes…
Her first novel was returned unread; she published everything anonymously and died at 41
A clergyman’s daughter with no money of her own, she wrote at a small table in a shared sitting room, sold one book to a publisher who sat on it for…
A secretary with no degree who changed what we know about chimpanzees, and about ourselves
She saved waitressing tips for a boat to Africa and was sent into the forest with her mother as chaperone. Within months she had seen a chimpanzee…
A Scottish matron in Budapest who would not leave her Jewish girls, and died in Auschwitz
A Dumfriesshire farmer's daughter who ran the girls' boarding house at the Scottish Mission school in Budapest from 1932. Ordered home in 1940, she…
The Old Doctor who gave children a parliament and a court, and would not leave them on the road to Treblinka
A Warsaw paediatrician and children's author who ran an orphanage on the principle that children have rights now, not later. Offered escape from the…
Won a 268-mile winter race outright while expressing milk for her baby, then conquered the Barkley
A vet and fell runner who beat every man in the Spine Race along the Pennine Way in January 2019, and in 2024 became the first woman to finish the…
Told the manager she was a lion, not a monkey, and led the Grunwick strikers for two years
A film-processing worker from Gujarat via Tanzania, she walked out of a north London factory in 1976 and became the face of a strike that drew…
Programmed the first electronic computer and was written out of the story for 40 years
A farm girl from Missouri, she was one of six women who worked out how to program ENIAC with cables and switches and no manual. When it was unveiled…
Crashed twice trying to reach Australia, then set records across three oceans and died in obscurity
A dentist’s daughter from Rotorua who sold her piano to pay for flying lessons, made the first solo flight from England to New Zealand in 1936, and…
Paralysed except for one eyelid, he blinked a whole book into existence and died two days after it appeared
The editor of French Elle was left with locked-in syndrome by a stroke at 43 and dictated a memoir letter by letter with his left eyelid; it was…
Helped identify Ebola in 1976 and spent the next five decades fighting its outbreaks
A microbiologist who travelled into the forest in 1976 to investigate a mysterious fever and helped identify Ebola. He kept returning to outbreaks…
Disguised as a man, she became the first woman to travel all the way around the world
A peasant herb-woman from Burgundy who bound her chest, joined a French naval expedition as a botanist’s valet in 1766, and collected thousands of…
The engineer from Queens who invented the video game cartridge
A self-taught electronics enthusiast who never finished college, he led the team that built the first games console with swappable cartridges, a…
Took over his widowed mother’s herbalist shop at 13 and built Boots the Chemists
His father died when he was ten, leaving a small herbal shop in a poor part of Nottingham. He cut prices so ordinary people could afford medicine,…
Won four Olympic golds in Berlin in 1936 in front of Hitler
The son of a sharecropper, he set three world records in 45 minutes as a student and then dismantled Nazi claims of racial superiority at the Berlin…
Born without arms, she learned to fly a plane and earn a pilot's licence using only her feet
Born without arms due to a rare birth defect, she taught herself to do everything with her feet and became the first person to earn a pilot's licence…
Sailed alone around the world at sixteen after a collision that nearly ended the attempt
A dyslexic teenager from Queensland who spent 210 days alone at sea in a pink 34-foot yacht, weathering knockdowns in the Southern Ocean, and sailed…
Dives into flooded caves and icebergs most people would not enter with a rope tied to their waist
A Canadian cave diver who explores submerged caves and Antarctic icebergs no one has entered before, work she has repeatedly survived by inches while…
Left school at 15, built a perfume house from her kitchen, sold it, survived cancer and started again
She left school with no qualifications and began making bath oil for her facial clients in a small London flat. Estée Lauder bought the company in…
Discovered pulsars as a student and watched the Nobel Prize go to her supervisor
A girl who failed the eleven-plus went on to find a new kind of star by staring at miles of chart paper. When she was finally given a major prize…
Found the true shape of planetary orbits while defending his mother against a charge of witchcraft
A sickly child of a mercenary father, he spent years wrestling with the orbit of Mars until he gave up circles for ellipses. His three laws of motion…
