An Albanian from Skopje who at eighteen entered an Irish order and was sent to teach in Calcutta. For eighteen years she taught geography to girls from well-off families, and in 1946, by her own account, heard “a call within a call” — to go to the poorest. Two years later she walked out of the...
Weiterlesen: Mother Teresa
Karol Wojtyła lost his mother and brother early, worked under the German occupation in a quarry and a chemical plant, acted in an underground theatre and trained there, underground, for the priesthood. In 1978 the conclave elected him pope — the first non-Italian in four and a half centuries and...
Weiterlesen: John Paul II
The son of a rich Irish family and a torpedo-boat commander in the Pacific whose boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer — he swam his crew out. At forty-three he became the youngest man elected president of the United States and the first Catholic in the office. His three years held the...
Weiterlesen: John F. Kennedy
A Baptist minister from Atlanta who at twenty-six led the Montgomery bus boycott — for more than a year the city’s black residents walked, and the Supreme Court struck down segregation on the buses. Then came the marches, the jails, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the 1963 March on Washington
Weiterlesen: Martin Luther King
She came to the throne at eighteen and reigned for sixty-three years, longer than any British monarch before Elizabeth II. An age is named after her: railways, steam, factories, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, and an empire that by the end of her reign covered a quarter of the...
Weiterlesen: Queen Victoria
A Corsican who spoke French with an accent, he finished artillery school and took Toulon at twenty-four. Then came Italy, Egypt, the coup of 18 Brumaire and the crown he placed on his own head in 1804. The Civil Code, the prefects, the Bank of France and the lycées outlived his rule and stand to...
Weiterlesen: Napoleon Bonaparte
A Serb from a Croatian village who arrived in America with four cents and a letter of introduction to Edison. The two parted quickly: Edison stood for direct current, Tesla for alternating, which a transformer can step up and send hundreds of miles. The “war of the currents” ended in alternating...
Weiterlesen: Nikola Tesla
He dropped medicine, was being prepared for the church, and at twenty-two found himself aboard the Beagle as an unpaid ship’s naturalist. Five years of sailing gave him South America, the Galápagos with their finches and tortoises, and a chest of notes out of which everything else grew. He sketched
Weiterlesen: Charles Darwin
A premature baby nobody expected to survive grew into the man who set the shape of physics for two hundred years. He sat out the plague years of 1665–1667 in the countryside and said later that this was when he devised the calculus, split white light into colours with a prism and first reckoned...
Weiterlesen: Isaac Newton
The son of a wealthy barrister, schooled at Harrow and Cambridge, he came home into the independence movement and spent nine years of his life in British prisons, where his books were written. Gandhi saw a political heir in him, though the two looked in different directions: Nehru wanted industry,...
Weiterlesen: Jawaharlal Nehru