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.
Totally deaf by 20, he could not attend a lecture or use a telephone, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
A Sydney boy whose hearing failed through his teens chose chemistry because it was a subject he could learn from books. His wife, also a chemist, was…
A bush parson who spent a decade making the Flying Doctor happen after a stockman died waiting for help
Presbyterian minister to the Australian outback who built nursing hostels across the interior, then spent years chasing aircraft and radio until the…
Pawned his mother's furniture to launch a magazine when no bank would lend to a Black publisher
Born into poverty in segregated Arkansas and raised partly on welfare in Chicago, he borrowed against his mother's furniture to launch Negro Digest…
A shy country squire who inspected every prison in England and then in Europe, and died of jail fever
Made High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773, he found men held in jail after acquittal because they could not pay the jailer. He spent the rest of his…
Had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spent 33 years in Congress making good trouble
The son of Alabama sharecroppers who practised preaching to the family chickens, he was beaten as a Freedom Rider, spoke at the March on Washington…
Built the first working television out of a hatbox, a biscuit tin and darning needles
In poor health and short of money after a string of failed businesses, he assembled a television from junk in a Hastings lodging house and in 1926…
Blind from the age of six, he built 180 miles of roads across the Pennines and laid them over bogs
Blind Jack of Knaresborough lost his sight to smallpox, earned his living as a fiddler, ran a stagecoach line, and from 1765 became the first…
A labourer's son who traced cholera to a water pump when everyone blamed bad air
He walked from Newcastle to London to study medicine, gave the Queen chloroform, and mapped the deaths of Soho to prove cholera was in the water. The…
Gave his family’s department stores to the people who worked in them
At 21 he worked out that he, his brother and his father took as much from the business as all 300 staff combined, and decided this was wrong. Over…
An IT consultant who found twelve boys alive in a flooded cave after nine days of searching
A British cave diver and IT consultant who, with Rick Stanton, located twelve boys and their coach alive deep inside a flooded Thai cave in 2018 and…
Lost a leg to meningitis at five and won the Paralympic 100 metres twice
Told he might not survive the night as a small boy, he found sprinting at a talent day at 15 and four years later beat Oscar Pistorius to gold in…
Nine years cataloguing in a small library, then made director of the national one as he went blind
An obscure municipal librarian in his forties, ridiculed and demoted by Perón, he wrote the stories that reinvented fiction in his spare hours and…
A chef who decided a disaster zone was just a kitchen with no food yet
A Michelin-trained chef who, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, began flying toward disasters instead of away from them, building World Central Kitchen…
Lost a hand and an eye in a childhood accident, he went on to paint Mexico's harshest murals
Blinded in one eye and missing a hand after a gunpowder accident as a teenager, he trained himself to paint one-handed and became one of Mexico's…
A priest in a poor Basque town who started a technical school that grew into a cooperative empire
Sent as a young priest to the impoverished town of Mondragón after the Spanish Civil War, he founded a technical school and then a small cooperative…
Built the sewers that rid London of cholera and are still working 160 years later
After a breakdown from overwork and years of political delay, he designed and built London's sewer system: 82 miles of main sewers, three embankments…
A York grocer who made chocolate, then asked why people were poor in the first place
He joined his brother’s struggling cocoa works at 33, spent thirty years making it pay, and then put most of his wealth into three trusts to study…
A priest born into deep poverty who joined a shanty camp of 250 families and founded ATD Fourth World
Sent in 1956 to an emergency housing camp outside Paris, he stayed, founded a movement run with the very poor rather than for them, and had the day…
Spent sixteen years fighting laws that let police detain any woman they suspected of prostitution
After her daughter’s death she went looking for people worse off than herself and found them in Liverpool’s workhouse. She then took on Victorian…
First person to sail alone around the world, in a rebuilt oyster boat, when steam had ended his career
A washed-up sailing captain in his fifties who rebuilt a rotting sloop with his own hands, set off alone in 1895, and came home three years later…
A potter who lost a leg, never worked the wheel again, and built an industry instead
The thirteenth child of a Staffordshire potter, he was left lame by smallpox and turned from throwing pots to experimenting with clays and glazes,…
Called a fire hazard at five, she sued for the right to teach and led a 26-day sit-in for disability rights
Polio left her using a wheelchair from infancy. She was barred from school, then from teaching, and in 1977 helped occupy a federal building for 26…
Fled Hitler as a child and wrote The Tiger Who Came to Tea at 45
A refugee whose father’s books were burned by the Nazis, she worked as a textile designer and television scriptwriter before her first picture book…
Raised in a closed religious cult across dozens of countries, she cycled around the world alone as an adult
Raised inside the Children of God religious group across many countries with little formal education, she left as an adult and in 2012 became the…
