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 sacked sub-postmaster who spent twenty years proving the Post Office had prosecuted the innocent
When the Horizon computer system showed shortfalls he could not explain, he refused to sign for them and lost his post office. He then found the…
Invented stereo sound, helped create television and radar, and died testing his own equipment at 38
A boy who could barely read at 12, he filed 128 patents in 18 years, including the one that created stereo, and was killed in a wartime crash while…
A student from Barbados who wrote the first internet search engine to save himself some typing
Working as a systems administrator at McGill University in 1989, he wrote a script to index the files scattered across the early internet. Archie was…
Father of computer science whose codebreaking helped shorten the Second World War
He imagined the modern computer before one existed, led the team that broke the German Enigma cipher, and was later persecuted by the country he had…
A Zulu chief who chose the ANC over his chieftaincy and became Africa's first Nobel Peace laureate
A mission-school teacher and elected chief, he was told to choose between his position and the ANC. He chose the ANC, was banned for the rest of his…
Gave up a brilliant academic career at 30 to start medicine and build a hospital in the African forest
A theologian and concert organist who trained as a doctor and in 1913 founded a hospital at Lambaréné in Gabon, where he worked for fifty years.…
Nurse, midwife and mother who held a family and a movement together through decades of bans and prison
While her husband Walter served 26 years on Robben Island she raised their children, delivered babies in Soweto, was banned, detained and charged…
Drove Santiago's streets at night in a green truck picking up the homeless, and died of cancer at 51
A fatherless boy from Viña del Mar who became a Jesuit and in 1944 founded the Hogar de Cristo shelters for people sleeping rough. He also founded a…
Flew an airship round the Eiffel Tower, gave the prize money away, and refused to patent his aeroplanes
A Brazilian coffee heir who made Paris gasp with his small airships, he made the first officially observed powered flight in Europe in 1906 and…
A priest who opened his door to migrants riding freight trains north through Mexico
A Mexican Catholic priest who founded a shelter for Central American migrants travelling north on freight trains, offering food, medical care and…
Founded Belarus's human rights centre and received the Nobel Peace Prize in a prison cell
A literature scholar who set up Viasna in 1996 to help the families of political prisoners, he has been jailed twice for it, most recently sentenced…
Lost both legs in a racing crash and won four Paralympic golds on a handbike
A Formula One and Indycar driver who nearly bled to death after a 2001 crash, he went back to racing cars with hand controls, then took up…
Climbed a volcano further than anyone had gone and came back seeing nature as one connected system
A Prussian naturalist who spent five years travelling Latin America measuring everything he could, climbing higher than any recorded person before…
Reached the forbidden city of Lhasa at 55 disguised as a beggar, after four months walking in winter
An opera singer and anarchist who became a Buddhist scholar, lived in a Himalayan cave for two years and, in 1924, walked into Tibet’s capital as the…
The first person to walk in space, whose suit swelled so much he nearly could not get back inside
A pilot and painter who floated outside his capsule for twelve minutes in 1965, then landed in a snowbound forest and spent two nights waiting for…
Lost four years of specimens in a fire at sea, went back out, and found natural selection in a fever
Left school at 14 and paid for his science by selling beetles and birds. The letter he sent from a remote island forced Darwin to publish, and he…
Said the continents move, was laughed at for it, and died on the Greenland ice
A meteorologist and balloonist who noticed that the coastlines of Africa and South America fit together. Geologists mocked his theory for forty…
At 23 she found the first effective treatment for leprosy; at 24 she was dead and her boss took the credit
The first Black woman to graduate from the University of Hawaii solved a problem doctors had struggled with for centuries. Her method was used for…
Borrowed from an uncle to trade cement by the bag, then built Africa's biggest industrial group
From a Kano trading family, he borrowed a small sum to start importing goods by the container, then spent decades building cement, sugar and flour…
Born without arms and put into care, she became the artist whose pregnant body stood in Trafalgar Square
Raised in an institution after being born with no arms and short legs, she took a first-class degree in fine art, paints with her mouth and was…
The first Black player to win a Grand Slam, a decade before Arthur Ashe
A Harlem truant who was barred from most tournaments because of her colour, she won Wimbledon and the US Championships twice each in the 1950s and…
Shipwrecked and enslaved, he spent eight years walking home and returned arguing for indigenous rights
Shipwrecked on the Gulf coast in 1528, he lived for years as a captive, trader and healer among indigenous peoples of what is now the American South…
Flew the Atlantic alone in 1932, refused to be a passenger in her own life, and vanished over the Pacific
A social worker who scraped together money for flying lessons, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, and disappeared in 1937 near…
The Lagos doctor who refused to let an Ebola patient leave her hospital, and died of the disease
In July 2014 she diagnosed Ebola in a traveller from Liberia and, under pressure from officials, kept him in isolation in a city of twenty million.…
