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 pawnbroker's apprentice who took a mission into the East End and made an army of it
Preaching outside a Whitechapel pub in 1865, he built the Salvation Army, whose hostels, soup kitchens and rescue work reached the people no church…
Watched ships break up in Douglas Bay and founded the lifeboat service, then rowed out himself
A ruined baronet living on the Isle of Man who wrote a pamphlet in 1823 calling for a national lifeboat institution, saw it founded in 1824, and took…
Forced out of school by famine at 14, he built a windmill from scrap using a library book and lit his village
When drought left his family unable to pay school fees, he taught himself from a physics textbook in a small village library and built a wind turbine…
Trained as a mime in Paris before turning charcoal drawings into acclaimed animated films
A failed actor who studied mime in Paris, he returned to Johannesburg and invented a technique of filming, erasing and redrawing charcoal images that…
Introduced a bill to abolish the slave trade year after year for nearly twenty years until it passed
A rich, sociable young MP who found religion and was persuaded to take on the slave trade. He lost vote after vote, was mocked and threatened, and…
Abandoned while pregnant and working as a maid, she went on to classify ten thousand stars
A Dundee schoolteacher who ended up cleaning the house of the director of the Harvard Observatory. He hired her to do sums, and she built the first…
First woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, rebuilding it after decades of decline
Raised in poverty after her family was relocated from Oklahoma to San Francisco under a federal assimilation programme, she returned to Cherokee…
Wore a leg brace as a child and became the fastest woman in the world
Polio left her with a twisted leg and doctors said she would never walk normally. At 20 she won three Olympic gold medals in Rome.
Picked the wrong resistor from a box, heard the circuit tick like a heart, and built the implantable pacemaker
A wartime radio operator who trained on the GI Bill, he made the mistake in 1956 that led to the first practical implantable pacemaker, then gave up…
Anti-apartheid leader whose own record was stained by violence carried out in her name
As a social worker turned activist she endured banishment, solitary confinement and years of state harassment for opposing apartheid, later using her…
Her first book was blocked by the censors and she disowned her second, then wrote 350 poems that won the Nobel
A quiet Kraków poet who published fewer than four hundred poems in her lifetime and threw the rest away, she wrote about ordinary bewilderment in…
Wrote on toilet paper in solitary confinement and became Africa's first Nobel laureate in literature
A playwright who held up a radio station to stop a rigged election broadcast, spent twenty-two months in detention during Nigeria's civil war and…
A fighter far shorter than her rivals who became back-to-back Olympic taekwondo champion
Starting taekwondo at 13 in Jiangxi province, she beat opponents many inches taller than herself on speed and technique to win Olympic gold in the…
Stopped a plague that was killing everyone it touched, by insisting that doctors wear masks
A Penang-born doctor sent to Manchuria in the winter of 1910 to face an epidemic with a near-total death rate. He worked out it spread through the…
A former state factory worker who became China's richest self-made woman in property
She worked in a state-owned optical instruments factory in Chongqing before turning to journalism and then property, co-founding Longfor Group and…
A monk who broke the law to leave China and walked to India in search of the truth
A Buddhist monk who left Tang China illegally, he crossed deserts and mountains to reach India, studied for years at its great monasteries, and…
Has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital since 1977 and walks across the road to her studio every day
Haunted by hallucinations since childhood, she turned them into dots, nets and mirrored rooms, survived years of poverty and neglect in New York, and…
Lost the ability to walk to muscular dystrophy and became Singapore's most decorated Paralympian
Diagnosed with muscular dystrophy as a toddler and using a wheelchair by 13, she turned family swimming trips into a career that brought Singapore…
Started botany at 51 after two bad marriages and a breakdown, and collected 150,000 plants in thirteen years
She had no scientific training, no degree and no institution behind her. She travelled by canoe and mule through Mexico and the Amazon, alone for…
An enslaved man who helped carry an expedition across a continent and was denied his freedom for it
Enslaved by William Clark from childhood, he hunted, scouted and voted alongside free men on the Lewis and Clark expedition, then was refused the…
Saw people starve in the famine and spent the next sixty years making rice yield more
A rural agricultural teacher whose experimental plants were smashed during the Cultural Revolution. He rescued a few from a well, kept going, and…
Grew up in a Caracas slum without money for training shoes and became the greatest triple jumper ever
Raised in poverty in a Caracas barrio during Venezuela's economic collapse, she became the first Venezuelan woman to win Olympic gold and broke the…
A foundryman’s apprentice from an occupied village who became the first human in space
He spent part of his childhood in a mud dugout under German occupation, trained as a metalworker, and on 12 April 1961 orbited the Earth once in a…
Swam for three hours pushing a sinking refugee boat, then swam at the Olympics a year later
A teenage swimmer from Damascus who fled the war in 2015, she helped push a failing dinghy to the Greek shore, walked across Europe, and competed for…
