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.
Three months of schooling, nearly deaf, and more than a thousand patents
Sent home from school as a hopeless case, he sold newspapers on trains as a boy and went on to build the first industrial research laboratory, the…
Built a world-class insect research institute in Nairobi when Africa was told to buy science from abroad
An entomologist who argued that the continent losing most crops to insects should be the one studying them, and spent thirty years proving it could…
Terrified of water as a boy, he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft to test an idea everyone dismissed
He built a raft of logs and rope, sailed it 4,300 miles from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 with five companions and a parrot, and spent his life arguing…
Invented the World Wide Web and gave it away for free
Working at a physics lab in Switzerland, he wrote the software for the web in his spare time and refused to patent it, which is why the web is open…
Fled conflict as a teenager and became one of AI's most outspoken critics from inside a top research lab
Forced to leave Ethiopia as a teenager during the war with Eritrea, she rebuilt her education in the United States, became a leading researcher on…
Moved his mills out of the Bradford smoke and built a whole town for his workers
Having made a fortune spinning alpaca wool that others had given up on, he spent much of it building Saltaire, a village with decent houses, a…
Turned calligraphy into abstract art on her own terms and kept painting until she died at 107
Trained in classical calligraphy from the age of six, she broke away from it, spent two years among the New York abstract painters in the 1950s, and…
The only surgeon for hundreds of thousands in Sudan's Nuba Mountains, and he stayed through the bombing
A former college footballer from upstate New York who went to Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel in 2008 and remained when war returned in 2011,…
Survived three Antarctic expeditions, walked 35 miles alone to save a comrade, then ran a pub
A farm boy from Kerry who joined the Navy at fifteen and became the man Scott and Shackleton both wanted beside them when things went wrong, which…
A cobbler's son who mechanised shoemaking and built an entire town around his factory
Starting a small family shoe workshop with his siblings and almost no capital, he rebuilt it after early failure using American mass-production…
Built the first electronic computer with his own money and was ordered to keep quiet for 30 years
A bricklayer's son from the East End, he built Colossus to break Hitler's most secret cipher when the experts said it could not work, paid for parts…
Wrote her first novel before dawn while working full time and raising two sons alone
A single mother and book editor who published her first novel at 39, she went on to write Beloved and become the first Black woman to win the Nobel…
Bought a struggling Nigerian bank and later pledged to fund ten thousand African entrepreneurs
The son of a civil servant, he built a career in Nigerian banking, led the turnaround and expansion of United Bank for Africa across the continent,…
An Inuk guide whose sewing and survival skills kept a stranded ice-floe crew alive for months
Known to Europeans as Hannah, she and her husband guided and interpreted for Arctic expeditions for two decades, and her practical skill helped a…
A slum missionary who built Japan's cooperative movement out of famine relief and factory strikes
Orphaned young and disowned by his family for converting to Christianity, he lived for years in the Kobe slums, organised Japan's early labour unions…
Expelled from school at 15, she remortgaged her house to skipper the first all-female crew round the world
A troubled teenager who found her way onto yachts as a cook, she bought a battered old boat called Maiden, was ridiculed by the sailing…
A stuntman who invented the wind-up radio for Africa, then lost control of it and died with little to show
A swimmer, circus escape artist and pool salesman who taught himself engineering, he built the first clockwork radio in half an hour after watching a…
Born blind, she became the most decorated Paralympian in the history of the Games
Blind since birth, she swam competitively against sighted classmates in mainstream school meets, then dominated Paralympic swimming for over two…
Dropped out of Cambridge in despair, she wrote the first novel in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman
A novelist and filmmaker who left a medical degree at Cambridge unfinished, she returned home to write Nervous Conditions and later stood trial for…
Found the malaria drug that has saved millions in a 1,600-year-old Chinese text
With no doctorate, no foreign training and a lab that was little more than pots and ether, she tested a plant extract on herself and gave the world…
A textile worker and amateur parachutist who spent three days alone in orbit in 1963
Picked from the factory floor for her parachuting, she became the first woman in space and, more than sixty years later, is still the only woman to…
A "Lost Boy" of Sudan who turned his own survival story into schools back home
Separated from his family as a young child fleeing civil war in Sudan, he survived years in refugee camps, was resettled in the US, and used the…
Spent a career tracing how tuberculosis survives, in the country it kills the most
A South African microbiologist who has spent decades studying the biology of tuberculosis, one of the leading causes of death in her country, and…
Physicist turned campaigner for seed sovereignty and against corporate control of farming
Trained as a physicist, she turned to environmental activism after researching Himalayan deforestation, founded a seed-saving movement to resist…
