Albert Einstein - Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in the small town of Ulm, in southern Germany, near the source of Europe's longest river, the Danube. His parents, Hermann and Pauline were Jewish.He is best known for his theories of special relativity and general relativity. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein died on 18 April, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A. Graham Bell - How often do you use the telephone? Every day, two or three times a day or almost daylong? What would it be like if there was no phone? Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, who invented one of the most significant domestic device of today – the Telephone. This Scottish – American scientist had an inventive mind and a great vision. Alexander Graham Bell (3 March 1847 – 2 August 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.
Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's work.[1] His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876.[2] In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.[3]
Many other inventions marked Bell's later life, including groundbreaking work in hydrofoils and aeronautics. In 1888, Alexander Graham Bell became one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society William Shakespeare - The Bard of Avon, as he was known, is still famous in this era more than four hundred years after his birth. William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[a] was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist.[1] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".[b] His surviving works consist of 38 plays,[c] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[2]
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality,
religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[3]
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.[4][d] His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry".[5] In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Charles Babbage Charles Babbage, FRS (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871)[2] was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an astonishingly complex device for the 19th century. Considered a "father of the computer"[3] Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. Charlie Chaplin - Charlie Chaplin(16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was the first and foremost comedy artist of the silent era. He meant many things to many people. His working methods were a mystery until they rediscovered a cache of films he had stored away, which was brought to light after his death. His fourth wife, Lady Oona Chaplin generously consented to provide his film legacy. Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE was an English comedic actor and filmmaker. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker, composer and musician in the early to mid "Classical Hollywood" era of American cinema.
Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced and eventually scored his own films as one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. His working life in entertainment spanned over 65 years, from the Victorian stage and the Music Hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer almost until his death at the age of 88. His highprofile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, Chaplin co-founded United Artists in 1919.
In a review of the book Chaplin: A Life (2008), Martin Sieff writes: "Chaplin was not just 'big', he was gigantic. In 1915, he burst onto a war-torn world bringing it the gift of comedy, laughter and relief while it was tearing itself apart through World War I. Over the next 25 years, through the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, he stayed on the job. He was bigger than anybody. It is doubtful any individual has ever given more entertainment pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most Christopher Columbus - Even after five centuries, Christopher Columbus remains a figure shrouded in mystery and controversy; a persona who has been described in a variety of ways; that of one of the greatest mariners in history, a visionary genius, mystic, national hero, failed administrator, naïve entrepreneur, and a ruthless and greedy imperialist. (c. 1451 – 20 May 1506) was a Genoese navigator, colonizer and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean—funded by Queen Isabella of Spain—led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere. Although not the first to reach the Americas from Europe—he was preceded by the Norse, led by Leif Ericson, who built a temporary settlement 500 years earlier at L'Anse aux Meadows[1]— Columbus initiated widespread contact between Europeans and indigenous Americans. With his several attempts at establishing a settlement on the island of Hispaniola, he personally initiated the process of Spanish colonization which foreshadowed general European colonization of the "New World." (The term "pre-Columbian" is usually used to refer to the peoples and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors.)
His initial 1492 voyage came at a critical time of growing national imperialism and economic competition between developing nation states seeking wealth from the establishment of trade routes and colonies. In this sociopolitical climate, Columbus's farfetched scheme won the attention of Queen Isabella of Spain. Severely underestimating the circumference of the Earth, he estimated that a westward route from Iberia to the Indies would be shorter and more direct than the overland trade route through Arabia. If true, this would allow Spain entry into the lucrative spice trade — heretofore commanded by the Arabs and Italians. Following his plotted course, he instead landed within the Bahamas Archipelago at a locale he named San Salvador. Mistaking the North-American island for the East-Asian mainland, he referred to its inhabitants as "Indios".
Academic consensus is that Columbus was born in Genoa, though there are other theories. The name Christopher Columbus is the Anglicisation of the Latin Christophorus Columbus. The original name in 15th century Genoese language was Christoffa[2] Corombo[3] (pronounced [kriˈʃtɔffa kuˈɹuŋbu]) The name is rendered in modern Italian as Cristoforo Colombo, in Portuguese as Cristóvão Colombo (formerly Christovam Colom), and in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón.
The anniversary of Columbus's 1492 landing in the Americas is observed as Columbus Day on October 12 in Spain and throughout the Americas, except that in the United States it is observed on the second Monday in October. William Wordsworth - Born in Cockermouth, England was the pioneer and central figure of the English poetry in the Romantic Era, his effort was a brief flowering of creative spirit midway between the collapse of 18th century authoritarianism and of the Victorian Era. (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850. Adam Smith - Adam Smith was a genius among the economists along with also being a philosopher. Not only did he extend the boundaries of economy, but also enlightened and reformed the commercial policy of Europe. (baptised 16 June 1723 – 17 July 1790 [OS: 5 June 1723 – 17 July 1790]) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Adam Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics.[1][2] Smith studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and Oxford University. After graduating he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life he took a tutoring position which allowed him to travel throughout Europe where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith returned home and spent the next ten years writing The Wealth of Nations (mainly from his lecture notes) which was published in 1776. He died in 1790.