A farmer’s son who mended the neighbours’ watches and left for Detroit to be a machinist; he founded his own company at forty, on the third attempt. The Model T (1908) was meant as a car for everyone, and the moving assembly line of 1913 cut its build from twelve hours to one and a half and brought
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His first studio went bankrupt and he lost the rights to his first successful character in a contract — so he invented a mouse instead and called it Mickey. “Steamboat Willie” (1928) was among the first cartoons with sound and made the studio. After that he bet again and again on what nobody...
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A naval aviator who flew seventy-eight combat missions in Korea, then a test pilot on the rocket-powered X-15 that climbed to the edge of space. He joined the astronaut corps as a civilian. On Gemini 8 in 1966 he made the first docking in orbit, and when the craft was thrown into an uncontrolled...
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The fifteenth of Maria Theresa’s sixteen children, married at fourteen to the French dauphin for the sake of an alliance between two powers. She became queen at eighteen and the court disliked her at once: a foreigner, an Austrian, spending on dresses and on the Trianon where she played at village...
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The daughter of wealthy English parents, named after the city of her birth; against her family’s wishes she trained as a nurse — work her circle thought unseemly. In the Crimean War she came to the army hospital outside Constantinople and found a death rate higher than the fighting’s: the wounded...
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She forced her way into medicine, which did not admit women, and became one of the first women doctors in Italy. Working with children then called ineducable, she saw that the fault lay not in them but in the teaching: what was needed was not explanation but objects a child takes up for itself. In...
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She was taught at home, began writing on a bet with her sister, and knew the poisons that kill her characters not from books: in both wars she worked in a hospital dispensary. The first novel with Hercule Poirot appeared in 1920, and “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (1926), with its inverted solution,
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She grew up in a man of letters’ house with no right to a university — only the brothers were taught — and read her father’s library on her own all her life. After her parents’ deaths the house in Bloomsbury became the meeting place of a circle that gave a whole generation of English culture its...
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The son of a Nantes lawyer, sent to Paris to study law and staying there to write plays and libretti. Meeting the publisher Hetzel settled matters: “Five Weeks in a Balloon” (1863) opened the “Extraordinary Voyages” — more than sixty novels in forty years. “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas”,...
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A Dubliner who took every honour Oxford had and made a trade of wit: a lecture tour of America, fairy tales written for his own children, the single novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and four comedies, of which “The Importance of Being Earnest” has never left the stage. At the height of his fame...
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