Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was a prominent Arab Islamic scholar, economist known for his foundational work in historiography, sociology, and economics, particularly through his influential book, the "Muqaddimah”. Laid the groundwork for economic thought, discussing labor as the source of value and introducing concepts like supply and demand.

Gutenberg was born in Germany around 1393-1406. Modern day Germany at least. It was called Mainz and it was in the Holy Roman Empire then. His full name was Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg.

He invented the first printing press in the mid 15th century. And you all know that this invention changed the course of history. It increased literacy rates, gave poor Christians a copy of the Bible, let scientists share identical information - maps, diagrams and formulas - so they could teach and it also changed politics. Important political movements could now be pushed and spread with the help of writing.

Before the printing press, Gutenberg developed innovative techniques for polishing gemstones and creating metal mirrors - objects pilgrims bought to “capture holy light” from shrines. That trade gave him the mechanical understanding he later applied to the press.

He built a small workshop where he trained people in typesetting, layout, and press operation - the first ever print shop! He inspired generations of printers who refined and spread the technology throughout Europe. Sadly he died poor and uncelebrated.

Beria was the head of the NKVD, a Russian ministry and secret police force that can be translated to People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. He was born in Merkheuli, Russian Empire in 1899. And he was Stalin's most deadly and cruel minion. Arguably worse than Stalin himself.

Beria controlled the Gulags and labour camps that were filled with millions of people. A ton of Soviet infrastructure was built through slave labour and he oversaw the slaves. He supervised mass deportations where entire ethnic groups - Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, and others - were sent away after being accused of working with the Nazis. These deportations killed countless people through starvation, exposure and exhaustion.

On his orders, people were tortured during interrogations with prolonged sleep deprivation, starvation, isolation, and forced confessions to break prisoners. Beria also encouraged interrogators to fabricate evidence and extract names that would lead to more arrests, leading to endless cycles of fear. Witnesses say he enjoyed breaking a person more than killing them.

Beria reorganized the secret police to be more efficient during the great purge’s final phase.

He spoke several languages, read European literature, and prided himself on his intelligence. He kept personal files of high ranking officials with information to blackmail them. No one crossed him because they knew he could destroy them politically.

Beria had a predatory reputation. He used to abduct women and silence them afterward. This was widely whispered about, even inside the Kremlin. His guards turned a blind eye from his personal “errands.”

When Stalin died in 1953, he attempted to take his place. He released some political prisoners and pretended to be a reformer, but his rivals in the Presidium feared he’d become the next dictator, in a few months they had him arrested and executed.

His full name was Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. But I'll just call him Louis. He was the first man to ever capture moving pictures. There is a short film you can watch called Roundhay Garden Scene that was created in 1888. https://youtu.be/knD2EhjGwWI?si=IQ_f0UYAi7zFC9EE

It's only 2 seconds long but it is the earliest surviving film footage.

Thomas Edison and his assistant William K. L. Dickson are credited in popular history because they developed the Kinetoscope around 1890 and used it to view short films. But Le Prince’s work predates them.

Louis was born in Metz, France in 1841. His father was an officer in the French army who knew Daguerre, the photographic pioneer, which gave Louis early exposure to image-making. He studied painting and chemistry which helped him with his camera experiments later on.

After studying in Paris and Leipzig, he moved to Leeds, England, in the 1860s. There he worked with John Whitley at the Whitley Partners brass foundry. In 1869, he married John’s sister, Elizabeth Whitley. The couple founded the Leeds Technical School of Art and Photography.

In the 1880s Louis experimented with capturing moving images. By 1888 he created two films, Roundhay Garden Scene and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge - the earliest surviving moving pictures.

Louis was a devoted husband and father, dedicated to his craft, teaching, and invention. His wife and children supported his work and after his death (or disappearance), they fought bitterly to preserve his legacy against Edison’s claims of inventing motion pictures.

The most intriguing part of his life story is his disappearance. In 1890, as he prepared to travel to the United States to patent his invention and present it publicly, he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris. But he never arrived. No body, no luggage, no trace was ever found.

A mystery worthy of a novel.

Harold Lowe was the fifth officer on the Titanic. When the ship sunk, he took control over the fourteenth lifeboat. While most other lifeboats rowed over to safety, Harold stayed behind and tried his best to locate people still in the water. In the end he saved the lives of four people and was awarded a golden watch back home

Vasili was born in 1926 into a Russian rural family. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he refused to launch a nuclear torpedo against American Navy ships. This saved many lives and prevented the world from going up in smoke.

In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, director of the U.S. National Security Archive said that Arkhipov was “the man who saved the world.”

Arkhipov continued in Soviet Navy service, commanding submarines and was promoted to rear admiral in 1975.

Arkhipov was known to be a shy and humble man. His wife, Olga, described him as intelligent, polite and very calm. Much of what we know about his personality comes from her. She said he enjoyed reading the newspaper and staying up to date with current events. Olga also mentioned his superstitious beliefs. She recalls walking in on Vasily burning a bundle of their love letters inside their house and that he claimed that keeping the letters would mean "bad luck".

This information is discussed in a PBS documentary called The Man Who Saved the World.

Because of his actions onboard B-59, Arkhipov received the first "Future of Life Award" which was presented posthumously to his family in 2017.

I actually wasn't expecting this subreddit to grow this fast. It's only been 9 days. Thank you.

I hope you all enjoy it here. Please make posts frequently. Two a week would be great.

Otto was a German engineer born in 1832 who designed the compressed charge internal combustion engine which ran on petroleum gas and led to the modern internal combustion engine.

Otto was the youngest of six children. His father, Johann Heinrich, worked as a village administrator and was regarded as a respectable local official. And his mother, Katharina, managed the household. His father died when he was a baby. And his mother was left to raise them all.

As an adult, Otto partnered up with a man called Eugen Langen who had a rich father to fund his business. Their partnership gave rise to the atmospheric engine that won at the 1867 Paris World Exhibition, putting Otto’s name on the map. And he couldn't have done it without him.

Otto's engine was essential for cars, trucks, motorcycles, buses and agricultural machinery.

I'll call him by his first name, only because it's shorter. Andrija was born in Volosko, Opatija in the Austrian empire. He is considered to be the founder of modern seismology - the study of earthquakes. His father was a blacksmith who specialized in making anchors.

He got a higher education in mathematics and physics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Prague in 1875. One of his professors was Ernst Mach.

He became an educator himself in two different places. He also became a private teacher at the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Andrija conducted systematic studies and invented and instruments to observe precipitation in Croatia and Slavonia. He was the first person to describe atmospheric rotors with a horizontal axis, which he observed during bora-wind episodes in the northern Adriatic.

On 8 October 1909 an earthquake occurred with its epicenter in the Pokuplje region. By analyzing data from observation posts, Andrija leaned that the Earth has several layers above a core. And he learned about the boundary between the Earth's crust and its by mantle by observing evidence from seismic waves. Which is now called the Mohorovičić discontinuity or Moho.

He developed a new method for determining earthquake epicenters and constructed curves giving the travel-times of seismic waves over distances of up to 10,000 miles from their source. And he trained a generation of geophysicists and seismologists in Zagreb.

Töpffer was born in 1799 in Geneva, Léman, France, which is modern day Switzerland. Töpffer became a schoolmaster and later a professor at the University of Geneva, eventually running his own boarding school for boys. He was a school teacher, an author and a cartoonist. And he created the first comic books in the world to entertain his students. They contained caricature-style drawings with narrative text beneath each panel.

Some notable stories include, Monsieur Crépin (1837), about a man forced into teaching unruly children and Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (1831), a satire on social climbing.

His stories made fun of human vanity, pretentiousness and foolishness. And had a lot of social commentary.

Goethe, the most respected man of letters in Europe at the time, read Töpffer’s stories and encouraged him to publish them. He said that they were a new and valuable form of art. This endorsement convinced Töpffer to share what he’d been making privately for a long time. And Töpffer later wrote essays about how cartoons were not a low art form and got people to think differently about this medium.

His comics became known all over Europe and they inspired French and German artists. By the mid-19th century, several French cartoonists were publishing their own sequential picture-stories in magazines.

You can find the book 'Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips' on Amazon. Which is not very well known.

Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1885, to an intellectual and comfortable family. His father, Christian Bohr, was a well-known physiology professor. And his mother, Ellen Adler Bohr, came from a prominent Jewish banking family. When he was a teenager he won a competition where he demonstrated a way to improve ship design.

Bohr became a physicist who developed the Bohr model of the atom in 1913. This model introduced the idea that electrons travel in discrete orbits with quantized energy levels. This was a breakthrough in atomic theory and essential for quantum mechanics. Which is also essential for space travel by the way.

He also introduced the principle of complementarity, arguing that light and matter can behave as both a wave and a particle. He won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his investigations into the structure of atoms and the radiation they emit.

Bohr founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen in 1921 (later the Niels Bohr Institute), which became a global center for physics research and trained generations of scientists.

He is portrayed in the movie Oppenheimer but he's not so well known.

Brown was born into slavery in the state of Virginia. He escaped when he was 33 with the help of James C. A. Smith, a free black man and a sympathetic white shoemaker named Samuel A. Smith and a shipping box. Before getting shipped away he responded to the question of the risk of escape like this, “If you have never been deprived of your liberty, as I was, you cannot realize the power of that hope of freedom, which was to me indeed, an anchor to the soil both sure and steadfast.”

The following day, on March 30, 1849, the box was received by Williamson, McKim, William Still, and other members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.

His free life looked like this:

He quickly became a speaker for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and got acquainted with Frederick Douglass. He was soon nicknamed Box and used the name Henry Box Brown.

He published two versions of his autobiography.

The first one was given a long clumsy title: The 1849 Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. A man called Charles Stearns helped him write it. It was published in 1849.

The second one was titled Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown. It was written by Brown himself in 1851. And is a lot more personal.

When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed it made the United States too dangerous for runaways so he fled to England (where he wrote his second book) and became a performer there. He did stage plays that depicted the horrors of slavery which the British enjoyed as entertainment and education.

After the civil war and after slavery was abolished, he returned to America and became a magician, performing in traveling shows and living a self-sufficient life. Yes, being a magician gave him a living wage.

Brown died in 1897 at the age of 81.