Curated playlist
19th-century English writers
- Charles DarwinCharles Darwin likened confessing his theory to confessing a murder. He told botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1844.
- Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill escaped a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria by hiding on freight trains. It made him famous.
- H. G. WellsH. G. Wells described atomic bombs in a 1914 novel. Physicist León Szilárd later said reading it stayed with him.
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley isolated oxygen but never accepted what it meant.
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at age three. His father was deliberately raising a genius.
- John SnowIn 1854, John Snow had a London council remove a water pump's handle during a cholera outbreak.
- David RicardoDavid Ricardo started with almost nothing after his father disowned him at 21. He still became a famous economist.
- Thomas Robert MalthusThomas Malthus argued that population always grows faster than the food supply.
- Ada LovelaceWas Ada Lovelace really the first computer programmer? Historians still disagree about her notes on Babbage's engine.
- Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham, the English philosopher, jurist and social reformer who lived from 1748 to 1832, is on public display at the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London. Visitors find a seated figure in a glass case,…
- Humphry DavyIn 1799, chemist Humphry Davy breathed sixteen quarts of laughing gas for nearly seven minutes.
- Alfred North WhiteheadAlfred North Whitehead walked into his Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1927 and lost his audience within a week. The astronomer Arthur Eddington had given the series the year before, and he had held a crowd of 600 people…