James Cook

Captain James Cook (1728-1779), was an English navigator. Captain cook accurately charted vast regions of the south pacific; provided a basis for England's claim to Australia and New Zealand; and developed a diet that prevented scurvy among seamen. Born of farming parents in Yorkshire, Cook went to sea as a boy and joined the Royal Navy in 1755. His seamanship and deligence soon gained recognition, and four years later he was made a master of a naval sloop. From 1763 to 1767 he explored the St. Lawrence River and the shores of Labrador and Newfoundland. 

In 1768, with a group of scientists, Cook set out on his first expedition, sailing around Cape Horn. The immediate purpose was to observe the transit of the planet Venus from the vantage point of Tahiti. On his voyage, which continued  till 1771, the party went on to explore the coast of New Zealand and to chart the eastern coast of Australia.  As a result of this expedition, Cook was promoted to commander in the navy and was sent with two ships to determine whether there was a continent at the south extremity of the earth. Although they did not sight Antarctica, the explorers were the first to cross the Antarctic Circle. During this expedition of 1772-75, Cook sailed around the world far to the south, mapping the South Pacific and other southern latitudes much as they are known today. By providing the crews with sufficient vegetables, Cook proved that scurvy, a desease caused by lack of vitamin C, need no longer plague men on long voyages. 

Cook was promoted as captain and on his third voyage of discovery, 1776-78, undertook a search for the Northwest Passage - a linking of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans by way of Arctic regions. He approached from the Pacific side and discovered the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. Although he found no passage through the ice, Cook explored the northwest coast upto Bering Strait. After his return to Hawaii, he was killed by a native because of a misunderstanding over a missing boat. The journals of Cook and his associates are among the most entertaining accounts of discovery and scientific investigation.

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), was a Danish writer. Though a poet and novelist, he is most famous for his fairy tales. He has delighted young readers of all lands with his sometimes simple, always imaginative stories of fir trees and flowers, storks, swans, and nightingales, and princes, princesses and soldiers.

Anderson took traditional tales and themes and by his sympathetic understanding of human emotions and qualities gave them deeper moral and symbolic meaning than they had possessed originally. Some of these tales are based on stories told by common people among whom he spent his childhood. Others are mainly products of his own imagination, though strongly colored by folk themes and settings. Andersen's sunny nature would not permit him to use bitter satire, but he sometimes mocked people's frailties in a gentle way, as in "The Emperor's New Clothes." Often there is a tinge of sadness, as in "The Ugly Duckling." Andersen is said to have considered this story, which tells of an awkward young swan at first mistaken to be a duckling, an allegory of his own life. 

Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, the son of a poor shoemaker. His ugliness made him shy, and he was treated rudely by other children in school. When he was 11, his father died and Hans quit school to work in a factory. He amused himself at home by reading plays and acting them out with puppets in a toy theater he had built. When he was 14, Hans left home for Copenhagen. There he tried everything to get into the theater - write, act, sing, dance. He did attract the attention of influential persons and was sent to a government school. Although 17 years old, Hans had to enter a class for small boys. His `unhappiness continued, but he remained in school for five years. He then left to try his hand at poetry, travel books, farce, and fiction.

Andersen's first novel, The Improvisatore (1835), was received enthusiastically, and his financial troubles were at end. In the same year the first instalement of his fairy tales were published, and were reviewed unfavorably by all critics but one. Andersen agreed with this general opinion, for he considered his adult work of more importance. Nevertheless he kept on writing fairy tales. 

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie (1837-1919), was a United States industrialist and philanthropist, who was the world's richest man during his time. After making a great fortune in the iron and steel industry, he distributed most of it in gifts and endowments for the good of mankind. Carnegie gave about $350,000,000 to build libraries, advance education and science, promote world peace, and to support other cultural and welfare work.

Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. After his father, a weaver, lost his job, the family migrated in 1848 to Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh). Young Carnegie, then a boy of 11, worked first in a cotton mill at $1.20 a week. When he was 14 he became a telegraph messenger boy. Two years later having taught himself to send and receive messages, he was made a telegraph operator at $4.00 a week.

In 1853 Carnegie became a telegraph operator and secretary to Thomas A. Scott, superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. During the next 12 years Carnegie advanced steadily until he succeeded Scott as superintendent of the Pittsburgh division. When Scott was named the assistant secretary of war, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he took Carnegie to Washington with him to help direct military railways and telegraphs for the Union.

Carnegie returned to Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad before the end of the war. Already he had begun the investments that were to be the basis of his immense fortune. In the 1850's he had bought stock in the first company to make sleeping cars. Before the Civil War was over, Carnegie was reaping dividends from an oil land investment in Pennsylvania. 

Realizing that iron and steel would play an ever greater part in the American economy, Carnegie resigned from the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865 to give all his energy to this new industry. He had already helped to found the Keystone Bridge Company, and had organized the Superior Rail Mill and Blast Furnaces (1863-64) . Now he established the Union Iron Mills.


On a visit to Great Britain Carnegie noticed that the British were using steel rather than iron for rails. He introduced the Bessemer process into his mills in 1868, and was thus able to compete with British steel manufactures- then the worlds leaders. In 1873 he established the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Mills, and within 16 years United States production overtook the British output. In 1899 he merged all his holdings into one organization, the Carnegie Steel Company. By 1900 it was producing a fourth of the country's steel. 

Wishing to retire, Carnegie in 1901 sold his company to the newly formed United States Steel Corporation, headed by J. Pierpont Morgan and Elbert Henry Gary. For his share Carnegie received $250,000,000 in 5 per cent 50-year gold bonds. 

Now Carnegie could give more time to his major interests - reading, writing, friends, travel, and spending his money for public purposes. In 1889 he had written in an essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," that a rich man was merely a "trustee" of his fortune - that it was his duty to distribute it for "for the improvement of mankind."

The rest of his life Carnegie spent in putting his conviction into practice. His first act, in 1901, was to give the employees of the Carnegie Company $5,000,000 in the form of a pension and benefit fund. He gave a library to his native town, Dumfermline. He followed this by giving a public library and hall to Allegheny City, his first home in the United States. Later he gave many millions of dollars for libraries. He built Peace Palace at The Hague in the Netherlands, the Pan-American Union building in Washington, D. C., and Carnegie Hall in New York. He contributed to Scottish universities and set up a trust for the town of Dunfermline. (Carnegie and his wife spent many summers at "Skibo Castle" on their estate in Scotland.) His largest gifts were to the Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

Carnegie's writings include Triumphant Democracy (1886), in which he urged Great Britain to become a republic; The Empire of Business (1902); and Problems of Today (1909). He also wrote a number of travel books and many magazine articles. His autobiography was published in 1920.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (Leonard) (1894-1963), was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, and poet. He is noted for the satirical novels of his early period. They are chiefly concerned with ideas; plots are unimportant and characters are seldom more than spokesmen for the author’s views. “Point Counter Point” (1928) expresses disgust with the emphasis on intellectualism at the expense of instinct and emotion. “Brave New World” (1932) pictures a technological world of the future in which laboratory produced human beings find satisfaction in mechanized pleasures and a drug.

After the 1930’s, Huxley turned toward philosophy and mysticism. The novels of his later period, such as “Time Must Have a Stop” (1944) and Island (1962), show a decline in Huxley’s literary ability. In “The Doors of Perception” (1954) he writes of his experiences while taking hallucinogenic drugs as mescaline and LSD.

He was born in Surrey, a grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and a brother of Sir Julian Huxley. After attending Eton College, he graduated from Oxford University in 1915. An eye ailment that caused near-blindness turned him from science studies to literature. In “The Art of Seeing” (1942) he described an eye-training program that greatly improved his sight. He wrote dramatic, art, and musical criticism for the London magazine “Athenaeum” (1919-20), and was dramatic critic of the literary periodical “Westminster Gazette” (1920-21). During and after his residence in Italy (1923-30), he visited India and Central America, settling in California in 1937.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a United States author. Most of his work shows concern for moral issues. A deeply ingrained conscience seems to generate in him an obsession with the problem of sin, its nature and consequences. His strong sense of human guilt tinges most of his novels and short stories with a somber hue. Unlike some other puritans, Hawthorne apparently felt a keen sympathy for the erring and demon driven people he pictures.

Hawthorne liked to call his novels “romances” because they deal with interior rather than outward phases of life. They explore the secret chambers of the heart, soul, and mind. He maintained that a writer of romances, unlike the realist who relies upon personal observation and fidelity of facts, need be faithful only to “the truth of the human heart.” Hawthorne frequently pictures people who are morbid and melancholy, but their gloom is mostly of an inner kind unlike the physical horrors that are characteristic of Poe’s tales. His people ordinarily are more symbolical or allegorical than lifelike, manipulated by the author to make a moral point.

Charles Lyell

Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), was a Scottish geologist well known for popularizing the theory of Uniformitarianism - the idea that the Earth was shaped by the same scientific processes still in operation today. (As opposed to Catastrophism). He explained earthquakes and volcanoes among many other things. However his theory of icebergs and the transport of glacial erratics has been proven mostly wrong. Lyell believed in an infinitely long age of Earth, though geological evidence suggested an old but finite age. He was a close friend of Charles Darwin and contributed significantly to Darwin's thinking on the theory of evolution. Although he had difficulty in reconciling his religious beliefs with Darwin's Theory of Evolution, he later published evidence from geology of the time man had existed on Earth. 

Lyell was born into a wealthy family, the eldest of ten children. He worked briefly as a lawyer before entering the world of science. Principles of Geology Lyell's first book was his most famous, most influential and most important. It established Lyell as an important geological theorist. He popularized the work of James Hutton, another Scottish geologist, who died in the year Lyell was born.