John Harrison (1693-1776) - an English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer
Eli Whitney (1765 1825) - an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution.
Sequoyah (c. 1770 1843) - a Native American polymath of the Cherokee Nation. In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible.
Simon Bolivar (1783 - 1830) - a Venezuelan military and political leader who led what are currently the countries of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama to independence from the Spanish Empire.
Benito Juarez (1806 1872) - a Mexican lawyer and politician, who served as the 26th president of Mexico from 1858 until his death in 1872. He was the first president of Mexico who was of indigenous origin.
Frederick Douglass (1818 1895) - an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York.
Harriet Tubman (1822 1913) - an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902) - a leader of the women's rights movement in the U.S. during the mid- to late-1800s.
Clara Barton (1821 1912) - a pioneering American nurse who founded the American Red Cross.
Marie Curie (1867 1934) - a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
Janusz Korczak (1878 1942) - a Polish Jewish educator, children's author and pedagogue.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869 1948) - an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist, who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule.
Hellen Keller (1880 1968) - an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Mao Zedong (1893 1976) - also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People's Republic of China.
Nien Cheng (1915 2009) - a Chinese author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Cultural Revolution in her memoir Life and Death in Shanghai.
Jomo Kenyatta (1891 1978) - a Kenyan anti-colonial activist and politician who governed Kenya as its Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964 and then as its first President from 1964 to his death in 1978.
Nelson Mandela (1918 2013) - a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
Martin Luther King, Jr (1929 1968) - an American Christian minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.
Cesar Chavez (1927 1993) - an American labour leader, community organiser, businessman, and Latino American civil rights activist.
Wangari Maathai (1940 2011) - a renowned Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize.
