Browsing: Biographies

Saint Veronica is a legendary woman who followed Jesus’ on his journey to Golgotha, where he would be crucified. On the way, the woman is said to have dried Jesus’ sweaty and bloodied face with a cloth.

The perfume with her name is still very popular: Gloria Vanderbilt. This descendant of the immensely wealthy American Vanderbilt family,…

An old saying teaches that one cannot live on the wind. At the end of the nineteenth century, the French…

The American abolitionist John Brown tried in vain to start a slave revolt in 1859. He was hanged in 1859.

The Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen developed the first magnetic tape recorder, the telegraphoon, in 1898. A few years later, the Dane also made the very first answering machine for the telephone. The answering machine allowed callers to leave a message when their call went unanswered. Today voicemail systems are the most normal thing in the world, but in the early twentieth century this was still a new phenomenon. The telephone itself was also only a few decades old.

German chemist Felix Hoffmann went down in history as the man who gave the world the Aspirin. The painkiller consists of acetylsalicylic acid. The effect of that substance had been known for much longer, but Hoffmann marketed it under the name Aspirin in 1899, which made it extremely popular.

The philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and priest Giordano Bruno was executed for heresy on February 17, 1600, by order of Pope Clement VIII. He found his end on a pyre on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, where a statue of him stands today. Bruno is widely regarded as one of the most adventurous thinkers of the Renaissance.