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.
Fifty years of direct action for gay rights, from a hostile by-election to trying to arrest Mugabe
An Australian-born campaigner who was vilified in a 1983 by-election, founded OutRage!, and has been beaten more than once for protests abroad.…
Turned a projector, a camera and coloured tape into a wearable computer years before smartwatches existed
Growing up in a small town in Gujarat with little access to computers, he went on to build SixthSense, a wearable gesture-based device that projected…
A carpenter who taught himself to paint, he was not recognised as a master until his forties
Apprenticed as a woodcarver at fourteen in rural Hunan, he taught himself to paint from copied manuals and did not gain wide recognition until middle…
Locked up as a suspected communist, then deported, so he went home and built China's missile program
A co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped interrogate German rocket scientists in 1945, he was stripped of his clearance in 1950, held…
Left her husband and children to study in Japan, founded a women's journal and was beheaded at 31
A poet who unbound her feet, wore men's clothes and practised swordsmanship, she campaigned against foot-binding and arranged marriage and ran a…
Proved that women could protect themselves from HIV, after twenty years of trials that did not work
An epidemiologist from a small sugar town who documented, in the early 1990s, that young South African women were being infected with HIV far faster…
Designed the Spitfire while dying of cancer and never saw it fight
A locomotive apprentice from the Potteries who studied at night, he became chief designer at Supermarine at 24, won the Schneider Trophy outright,…
Set out from Beijing on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ended up negotiating with kings of Europe
A Nestorian Christian monk born near Beijing, he set out to visit Jerusalem and was instead sent by the Mongol court as an ambassador, meeting the…
Wrote Silent Spring while dying of cancer and launched the modern environmental movement
A marine biologist from a struggling farm family who supported her relatives on a government salary, then took on the chemical industry over…
Solved a problem holding back computer networks in a weekend and wrote the algorithm as a poem
She invented the spanning tree protocol that lets network switches find their way without loops, a piece of plumbing so basic that almost every…
Led volunteer rescuers pulling families from bombed buildings in Syria's civil war
A former shopkeeper who became head of the White Helmets, the volunteer civil defence force that dug survivors out of bombed buildings in…
Expelled from school in Nazi Germany, he invented the home video game console in a defence contractor's office
Thrown out of school at eleven for being Jewish, he escaped Germany with his family in 1938 and taught himself electronics. In 1966 he wrote a…
Built technology that reads human emotion after her own laptop never noticed hers
Raised between Cairo and Kuwait in a family that expected an early marriage, she instead studied computer science, moved to Cambridge for a PhD, and…
Handed out Swedish passes on the death marches from Budapest, then vanished into Soviet custody
A businessman with no diplomatic experience sent to Budapest in July 1944, he issued protective passports, filled thirty safe houses and bluffed the…
Trained as an architect on a construction site before turning around the company his family founded
After early jobs shovelling limestone and working on the factory floor of family businesses, he took charge of the loosely run Tata Group in 1991 and…
Tore the same knee ligament three times and still became Brazil's greatest ever gymnast
One of eight children of a house cleaner in Sao Paulo, she survived three ACL tears that threatened to end her career before it began, then won…
Grew up poor in segregated Baltimore and engineered the biggest leveraged buyout by a Black American
Raised in a working class Black family in segregated Baltimore, he became a Harvard-trained lawyer and financier and, in 1987, led the acquisition of…
Lost his brother and seven toes on Nanga Parbat, then rewrote what was thought possible at altitude
The South Tyrolean who climbed Everest without bottled oxygen, then alone, and became the first person to climb all fourteen of the world’s…
A poor, self-taught Frenchman who reached Timbuktu alone and lived to tell of it
Orphaned and poor, he taught himself Arabic and travelled disguised as a Muslim trader to become the first European known to reach Timbuktu and…
Mexican anarchist journalist whose writing helped ignite the revolution he did not live to see
A lawyer's son turned radical journalist, he was jailed repeatedly in Mexico and the United States for exposing the Diaz dictatorship's abuses, and…
Took over his father's failing firm at 21 and let the workers set their own pay and hours
He inherited a struggling Brazilian manufacturing company from his father in his early twenties and rebuilt it around radical workplace democracy,…
Built the first railway locomotive and died without the money to pay for his own funeral
A Cornish mine captain's son who was written off at school, he put the first steam locomotive on rails in 1804, lost everything chasing silver in…
A retired firefighter whose cave-diving hobby became the reason twelve trapped boys came home
A British cave diver and former firefighter who spent decades pushing the limits of flooded cave exploration as a hobby, then led the underwater…
Nobel laureate who exposed the massacre of Maya villages during Guatemala's civil war
A Kʼicheʼ Maya woman who lost family members to army massacres during Guatemala's civil war, she took her country's treatment of its indigenous…
