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.
Went to Ethiopia for three years in 1959 and stayed for the rest of her life, mending broken women
An Australian obstetrician who found women in Addis Ababa cast out because of childbirth injuries, developed the surgery to repair them and built the…
Lit the Olympic flame in Sydney and ten days later ran the race a whole nation was waiting for
An Aboriginal girl from Queensland who was once denied a medal because of her colour, she carried the weight of a divided country into the 400 metres…
The businessman who ran Oxfam like a firm and opened the first charity shop
A London furniture trader who became honorary secretary of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in 1942 and turned a wartime relief appeal into…
Worked out what stars are made of, then was told to say she was probably wrong
Cambridge would not give her a degree, so she left for America and wrote a thesis showing the universe is mostly hydrogen. A senior astronomer…
Turned farm workers no one thought could be organised into a union that won contracts
A migrant worker with an eighth-grade education, he founded the United Farm Workers, led a five-year grape strike and boycott, and fasted for 25 days…
Refused to patent the discovery that underpins a whole industry of modern medicines
The son of a Jewish immigrant who went back to Argentina to build science there, was forced out by a coup, and in a Cambridge lab worked out how to…
Gave up singing for ten years and was over fifty when the world finally heard the barefoot diva of Cape Verde
She sang morna in the sailors' bars of Mindelo for tips and drinks, quit for a decade when the work dried up, and became an international star in her…
Buried a girl who killed herself at 14 and, twenty years later, put a phone in a crypt
An Anglican priest whose first service was the funeral of a teenager who believed her first period was a fatal disease. In 1953 he founded the…
A falling barn door broke her spine at 13; wheelchair racing gave her 14 Paralympic golds
Paralysed by a childhood accident with an old barn door, she took up wheelchair racing on a teacher's suggestion and became one of the sport's…
Designed the first general-purpose computer in the 1830s and never got to see it built
He spent decades and a fortune designing calculating engines that were never finished, fell out with his engineer and his government, and was proved…
A seasick medical school dropout who sat on the most important idea in biology for twenty years
Chronically ill and terrified of the reaction, he delayed publishing natural selection for two decades and might have delayed longer had a letter…
Pasted labels on bottles in a rat-infested factory at 12 and kept the secret for the rest of his life
When his father was jailed for debt, he was pulled from school and sent to work in a blacking factory. The shame of it drove him to become the most…
Taught high school for fourteen years and, in his spare time, proved that insects can learn
With no laboratory, no assistants and no research funding, a Black science teacher in St Louis published dozens of papers showing that bees see…
Told that glass could never carry a telephone call, he proved it could and wired the world with light
An engineer at a Harlow telephone laboratory, he argued in 1966 that pure enough glass fibre could carry signals for miles, then spent years…
Gatecrashed the Royal Navy's review with an uninvited boat to prove his turbine worked
He invented the steam turbine, lost the rights to it and had to invent a second version. In 1897 he raced his little Turbinia through the fleet at…
Told literature could not be the business of a woman’s life, she wrote Jane Eyre anyway
A parson’s daughter from a windswept Yorkshire village who lost her mother and two sisters as a child, endured years as a governess and, after a book…
Drank herself out of music for a decade and came back at seventy-one to become a legend
A ranchera singer who wore trousers, smoked cigars and sang love songs to women without changing the pronouns, she vanished into alcoholism for years…
Built a carbon-dating laboratory in Dakar to test his own theories about African history
A Senegalese physicist and historian who trained in nuclear physics in Paris, then built West Africa's first radiocarbon dating laboratory to bring…
A market vegetable seller in Taitung who gave away most of what she earned over fifty years
Left school at thirteen to run the family stall after her mother died in childbirth because they could not pay a hospital deposit. She lived on…
The daughter of a Taiwanese tycoon who built her own phone company from a garage-sized start-up
She turned down an easy path into her father's conglomerate to co-found a small contract manufacturer that became HTC, one of the first companies to…
Supported his invalid parents from age 12 and was turned down by twenty firms before the photocopier worked
A patent clerk with arthritis who made the first dry photocopy in a rented kitchen in Queens in 1938, he waited more than twenty years for a machine…
A rubber tapper who learned to read at 18 and stood in front of chainsaws to save the Amazon
He led fellow rubber tappers in peaceful standoffs against ranchers clearing the forest they lived from, invented the idea of extractive reserves,…
The experiment that overturned a law of physics was hers; the Nobel Prize went to the theorists
She left China in 1936 for a doctorate and never saw her parents again. Twenty years later her painstaking experiment proved that nature can tell…
The only copy of his first novel sat ignored in a London typing agency for months
The father of modern African literature nearly lost Things Fall Apart before it was published, and spent his last two decades in a wheelchair after a…
