The story of man’s attempt to rival the birds is as old as the human race. From Greek mythology we have the story of Icarus who had wings of feathers sewn on with threads and fastened with wax. He flew too near the sun, and the wax melted. Icarus fell into the sea and was drowned. Oliver of Malmesbury, an …

According to Roman legend Romulus and Remus were grandsons of Numitor, King of Alba, who was deposed by his brother, Amulius. Numitor’s daughter was forced to become a Vestal Virgin, but Mars, the god of war, fell in love with her and she gave birth to twin sons. Amulius commanded that the infants be drowned and they were thrown into …

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 …