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.
Built the first working programmable computer in his parents' living room
Bored by the endless calculations of his engineering job, he built a computer from scrap metal and old telephone relays. It worked in 1941, and was…
Born without the lower part of his spine, he crawled the Kokoda Track and won Paralympic marathons
Raised in a tiny town where he got about by crawling, he became one of the great wheelchair marathoners, winning in New York five times and at two…
Collected rents by day for 42 years and painted the industrial north at night
A Salford rent collector who painted after ten o’clock at night once his bedridden mother was asleep, he had his first London exhibition at 51,…
Given away as a slave twice over, her fluency in three languages reshaped an empire's fate
Sold into slavery as a child and later given to Hernan Cortes, she became his indispensable interpreter during the conquest of the Aztec empire, a…
Won Olympic volleyball gold as a player, then as a coach, on opposite sides of the world
The star of China's 1984 Olympic volleyball champions, she later coached the United States to beat her own country in Beijing, then came home to lead…
A wartime childhood in Ukraine gave way to the most decorated Olympic gymnastics career ever recorded
Growing up in Kherson during the Second World War, she took up gymnastics after her father was killed at the front, and went on to win 18 Olympic…
The Filipino organiser who started the Delano grape strike and then asked César Chávez to join
A cannery worker with a sixth-grade education and seven fingers, he led the Filipino farm workers who walked out of the vineyards in September 1965,…
A Hungarian journalist who fled the Nazis to Argentina and gave the world the ballpoint pen
Frustrated by fountain pens that smudged, he noticed how fast newspaper ink dried and, with his chemist brother, designed a pen fed by a rolling…
Started printing tea towels on her kitchen table in a Pimlico flat and dressed a generation
A secretary from Merthyr Tydfil, she began with a silkscreen her husband built and £10 of materials. Within thirty years the prints from her kitchen…
A West Indian cricketer who took a London hotel to court for racism and became Britain's first Black peer
The most exciting cricketer of his day, he settled in a Lancashire mill town, won a landmark court case against a hotel that turned him away in 1943,…
A Korean doctor turned priest who built a hospital, a school and a brass band in South Sudan
The ninth of ten children of a widowed seamstress in Busan, he qualified in medicine, then trained as a Salesian priest and went to Tonj in 2001. He…
Built a company that paid the world’s poorest people for digital work, and died at 37
The daughter of Indian immigrants, she taught in Ghana at 17 and later founded Samasource to bring data work to slums and refugee camps instead of…
Watched the bomb fall on Nagasaki, then took a dying man into his house and nursed him
One of the most decorated bomber pilots of the war, he came home restless and failed, until a dying ex-serviceman with nowhere to go turned his empty…
Committed to an asylum in Spain after fleeing the Nazis, she escaped and became a leading surrealist
A wealthy English debutante who refused the role, she suffered a breakdown and forced psychiatric committal after fleeing occupied France, then…
Sang his way through Dragons’ Den with a hot sauce made in his Brixton kitchen
Raised by his grandmother in Jamaica, he could not read when he joined his parents in London at eleven. After years as a reggae musician and time in…
A Bavarian immigrant peddler whose tent-cloth trousers became the world's most copied garment
Born to a Jewish family in Bavaria, he emigrated to New York as a teenager after his father's death, worked as a peddler, and later built a San…
Son of escaped slaves who drew the telephone patent and made the light bulb last
Starting as an office boy in a patent firm, he taught himself drafting by watching, drew the plans for Bell's telephone patent and patented a better…
Organised the women who sat in the sun for months until Liberia’s warlords made peace
A trauma counsellor who had spent years listening to child soldiers, she gathered Christian and Muslim women in white to protest until the civil war…
Climbed Everest more times than any other woman while working as a dishwasher to raise her children
A Nepali mountaineer who holds the record for the most Everest summits by any woman, achieved largely while working long hours in low-paid jobs in…
Recovered from tuberculosis as a child in the Urals to win six Winter Olympic golds on ice
A sickly child in the Ural Mountains who took up speed skating to build up her strength, she became the only skater to win every women's event at a…
Widowed with eleven children, she became the first woman professor of engineering in America
A psychologist and industrial engineer who studied how people actually work, she designed the kitchen layout most homes still use and kept her…
A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who built a catalogue empire from a wedding gift of two thousand dollars
Fleeing Nazi persecution as a child, her family emigrated first to Amsterdam and then to the United States, and as a young pregnant housewife she…
Started an operating system as a hobby and it now runs most of the world's servers and phones
A 21-year-old student in Helsinki posted a message saying his new system was "just a hobby, won't be big". Linux now underpins Android,…
A boy whose body stopped growing, signed on a paper napkin, who won the World Cup at 35
Diagnosed with a growth hormone deficiency his family could not afford to treat, he moved across the world at 13 to a club that would pay for the…
