William Morris was an eminent Victorian, born in 1834. He had a many-sided career as poet, artist, manufacturer and socialist. At Oxford he began a life-long friendship with Edward Burne-Jones, the painter and designer, who subsequently introduced him to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet and painter, and a leader of the Pre-Raphaelites. At one time Morris intended to enter the …

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), also known as Typhoid Mary, was the first person in the US to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. She worked as a cook in New York City. She was an Irish girl who’d migrated to the US for a better life. She infected nearly 53 people, three …

Marie Curie, a French physicist, was the first woman to achieve great fame in science. She was born in Poland in 1867 and married the French scientist, Pierre Curie, in 1895. Her main interest was radioactively in uranium ore, Marie Curie identified radium in 1898. Four years later, she managed to prepare the element itself, having extracted less than a …

In 1822, Hugh Clapperton, a young naval lieutenant, agreed to go with Walter Oudney and Dixon Denham to try and discover the source of the River Niger in North Africa. They journeyed south cross the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad, the first white men to visit the region. Oudney died at Murner, and the other two separated, Clapperton going …

Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century B.C., tells in his History of an expedition made by Phoenicians at the orders of the Egyptian pharaoh, Necho. He mentions its importance but fails to give the names of any of those who took part. About a century later another expedition set sail under a Phoenician called Hanno, and one of …

In 1570, Francis Drake, a Devon seaman, sailed to South America and sacked the Spanish town of Nombre de Dios. Later he climbed a tree on the Isthmus of Panama and saw, away in the distance, the shimmer of the Pacific Ocean. He swore that one day he would return and sail an English ship on that great ocean. It …

Sir Isaac Newton is often considered to be the world’s finest scientist. Born in Lincon in 1642, he studied at Cambridge and went on to discover the law of gravitation, and invent the first reflecting telescope. He was knighted n 1702 and died in 1727. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. He wrote his masterpiece, Principia, in 1687.

In 1800, Matthew Flinders was a young naval lieutenant with a passion for exploring. He sailed around the Australian coast with a friend called George Bass in a small boat they named ‘Tom Thumb’. Once, on going ashore, they were menaced by hostile natives but Flinders won them over by trimming their hair and beards! Later, in 1801, finders sailed …

Coeur de Lion, the Lion Heart, was the nickname of King Richard I of England (1157-99). From his youth he was engaged in almost constant war against his father, his brothers, or the king of France. Richard became king on his father’s death in 1189. He went off on the Third Crusade, and, captured on his way home, was imprisoned …

In 1827 a railroad was built from Baltimore to Ohio to counteract the prosperity that canals were bringing to Philadelphia and New York. It was originally intended to use horse power. But in 1830 a cheap, though not very reliable, method of propelling trains was tried out. The Baltimore and Ohio’s sailing car ‘Aeolus’ made its maiden voyage in the …