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.
Orphaned at 12, she became the first woman electrical engineer in America after a detour to Turkey
The first woman to take an electrical engineering degree at MIT, she could only get work supervising women calculators. She invented a calculator for…
A beekeeper who reached the top of Everest and spent the rest of his life building schools below it
Shy, awkward and physically unremarkable as a boy, he climbed Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953, drove tractors to the South Pole, and gave decades…
Sold her car, spent her pension and built a maternity hospital on a rubbish tip in Hargeisa
Somaliland's first trained nurse-midwife, a former first lady and WHO official, retired and put everything she had into a hospital in Hargeisa that…
A slum kid from Cavite who pushed a classroom on a cart to children the gangs were recruiting
Bullied by gang members as a boy, he and his friends founded the Dynamic Teen Company at sixteen, then loaded blackboards and books onto pushcarts…
Arrested for handing out leaflets about starving enemy children, she founded Save the Children
A failed schoolteacher with poor health who insisted after the First World War that hungry German and Austrian children were still children. She…
Found a sack of discarded bottle tops in his fifties and turned rubbish into shimmering cloth
A sculptor who taught at a Nigerian university for decades and worked in wood and clay, he began stitching thousands of flattened liquor-bottle caps…
Organised India’s poorest working women into a union and a bank when no one thought they counted as workers
A lawyer in Ahmedabad, she saw that the women who carried loads, sold vegetables and rolled cigarettes at home had no employer, no protection and no…
Prosecuted in Turkey for insulting Turkishness, she kept writing about the country's silenced histories
Raised by a single mother and grandmother after her parents divorced, she became one of Turkey's bestselling novelists, faced prosecution over a…
Trained as an engineer in Scotland, hired as an oiler, and invented the device that kept trains running
The son of parents who escaped slavery by the Underground Railroad, he could only get work shovelling coal despite his qualifications. He turned that…
Ran the first marathon under two hours and kept living in a training camp with no running water
Raised by a single mother in rural Kenya, he was left out of his country's Olympic team at 27, switched to the marathon and became the only man to…
Walked into Newgate's women's wards in 1813 and made Parliament look at what she saw
A Quaker mother of eleven who found women and children packed into filthy, violent prison wards, she organised schools and work inside, gave evidence…
A self-taught bush nurse who defied the doctors on polio and was proved right
With no formal qualifications she treated polio in the Australian outback with hot packs and movement instead of splints. Ridiculed at home, she was…
Distrusted charismatic leaders, including King, and built the student movement that changed the South
For fifty years she did the organising that history books skip: travelling the South for the NAACP, setting up King's office, and then making sure…
A homeless teenager who went on stage to dance, sang instead and won
Orphaned, sent to a reform school and living rough in Harlem at 17, she entered an amateur night at the Apollo, changed her mind about dancing at the…
An Olympic sailor who walked across the closed heart of Asia on a forged permit
A champion sailor and skier who turned to overland travel, she crossed Soviet Central Asia and then walked from Beijing to Kashmir through territory…
Sailed alone around the world faster than anyone before her
A girl from landlocked Derbyshire who saved her school dinner money for three years to buy a dinghy, she went on to set the record for the fastest…
A five-time Paralympic swimming champion who won her first two golds at 13
Born with achondroplasia, she moved across the country as a child to train, won two Paralympic golds in Beijing at 13, and became one of the faces of…
Told to go home and sit still in 1914, she took women's hospitals to France, Serbia and Russia
An Edinburgh doctor who offered the War Office fully staffed women's medical units and was dismissed. She sent them to the Allies instead: fourteen…
Told she would never walk again, she ran the factory that built Canada's Hurricane fighters
The first woman in Canada to graduate in electrical engineering and the first in the world to design an aircraft, she caught polio at 24 and walked…
Won three golds in eight days at one Olympics, then was sent to work in a uranium mine
A shoe factory worker who invented his own brutal training and won the 5000 metres, 10,000 metres and marathon at Helsinki in 1952, and lost…
Exposed the British concentration camps of the Boer War and was deported for her trouble
A Cornish rector’s daughter who at 40 had barely begun her life went to South Africa alone, documented the deaths of thousands of women and children…
When her husband was struck down, she quietly ran the building of the Brooklyn Bridge for 11 years
With the chief engineer bedridden and unable to visit the site, she taught herself mathematics and cable engineering and became his eyes, voice and…
Founded the suffragettes and was jailed and force-fed in the fight for votes for women
A Manchester widow with five children who decided that polite petitions had failed, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union and led a militant…
Taught for years without pay or title and proved a theorem at the heart of modern physics
Universities would not hire her, so she lectured under a man's name for nothing. Her theorem linking symmetry to conservation laws is now a…
