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 refugee family's son who dropped out of school at fifteen to sell computer parts
Born to a family expelled from Uganda under Idi Amin and rebuilt in Britain, he returned to East Africa as a teenager with a small loan and built a…
Spent her life extracting medicines from Indian plants in a chemistry department that barely had funding
The first woman to receive a doctorate of science from an Indian university, she worked on the chemistry of native plants for six decades and…
Beaten for making clay figures as a child, she became a leading sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance
Barred from a summer school in France because she was Black, she fought back publicly, built a studio that taught a generation of Black artists, and…
Built the balloon that reached the stratosphere, then the submarine that reached the ocean floor
A Swiss physicist who designed a sealed balloon capsule to reach the stratosphere in 1931, then applied the same pressure-vessel thinking to invent…
Built robots to help disabled children move and NASA rovers to help scientists see Mars
Inspired as a child by a robot on television, she became a NASA engineer working on Mars rover vision systems before shifting her research to robots…
Went looking for her disappeared son and founded the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
A housewife from Avellaneda who, after months of being turned away by officials, gathered thirteen other mothers in the main square of Buenos Aires…
Born an untouchable, he wrote India's constitution and led half a million people out of the caste system
The boy made to sit on a sack in the corner of the classroom earned doctorates in New York and London, fought Gandhi over the rights of the…
A rich young lawyer who fled from a leper in the rain, then gave his life to leprosy patients
Shamed by his own fear of a dying man, he trained in leprosy care, let doctors inject him with the bacteria, and in 1949 founded Anandwan, a…
Carved abstract sculpture in a Cornish yard while raising triplets and grieving a lost son
A Yorkshire engineer’s daughter who insisted on learning to carve stone directly, she worked through motherhood, war and the death of her son to…
Discovered that genes can move, and waited thirty years for anyone to believe her
Working alone in a maize field, she found that genes could jump around the chromosome. Colleagues thought she had lost her way. She kept going, and…
Drank a flask of bacteria to prove that ulcers were an infection, not stress
A junior doctor from a mining town who could not get anyone to listen. When his paper was rejected and no animal would catch the disease, he infected…
Barred from first-class cricket by apartheid, his selection for England helped isolate South Africa
Classified as Coloured under apartheid, he could only play on rough township grounds until an English radio commentator got him a league contract,…
Organised the March on Washington in eight weeks and was written out of the story for being gay
A Quaker pacifist who taught Martin Luther King the methods of nonviolence, served time on a chain gang and in federal prison, and was pushed to the…
The motorcycle racer whose small brass fitting stopped Spitfires stalling in combat
A butcher's daughter who lapped Brooklands at over 100 mph on her Norton, she solved the Merlin engine's cut-out problem in the Battle of Britain and…
Lost both arms and both legs to meningitis at 11 and became a Paralympic fencing champion
A child fencer from Venice who nearly died of meningitis, she is the only fencer in the world to compete at the top level without either hand, and…
Rejected by publishers, she printed Peter Rabbit herself and ended up saving a corner of the Lake District
A lonely Victorian girl who drew rabbits and studied fungi, she was turned down by publisher after publisher, printed Peter Rabbit at her own expense…
Too poor to finish university, he wrote The Famished Road and became the youngest Booker Prize winner
Forced to abandon university when the money ran out, he lived hand to mouth in London before writing The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize…
Sacked for demanding democracy, he won Latin America's first science Nobel from a borrowed laboratory
A pharmacist at 17 and a doctor at 23, he built Argentine physiology from nothing, was thrown out of his own institute twice for his politics, and…
Failed at boxing and record shops before borrowing eight hundred dollars to found Motown
After a brief boxing career and a failed record store, he borrowed money from his family in 1959 to start Motown Records in Detroit, building a…
Led her Lenca community against a dam on a sacred river and was murdered for winning
A Honduran indigenous leader who forced the world’s largest dam builder to abandon a project on the Gualcarque river, she was shot dead in her home a…
Took her husband's unproven car on a 65-mile road trip without telling him and fixed it as she went
Her dowry funded Karl Benz's workshop, and in 1888 she made the first long-distance drive in history, clearing a fuel line with a hatpin and…
Wrote the novel that turned Europe against war and persuaded Alfred Nobel to fund a prize for peace
An impoverished countess who eloped with her employer's son, she published Lay Down Your Arms in 1889, founded the Austrian Peace Society and became…
Flew a balloon and then a solar plane around the world, continuing a family habit of extremes
A psychiatrist from a family of extreme scientists, he co-piloted the first balloon to circle the globe nonstop in 1999 and later the first…
A Kenyan bush pilot who flew the Atlantic alone against the wind and crash-landed in a Nova Scotia bog
Raised on a farm in colonial Kenya, she trained racehorses, scouted elephant from the air, and in 1936 became the first person to fly solo non-stop…
