"Biographies" (95)
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. He was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Darwin was the British naturalist who became famous for his theories of evolution and natural selection. Like several scientists before him, Darwin believed all the life on earth evolved (developed gradually) over millions of years from a few common ancestors.
From 1831 to 1836 Darwin served as naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle on a British science expedition around the world. In South America Darwin found fossils of extinct animals that were similar to modern species. On the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean he noticed many variations among plants and animals of the same general type as those in South America. The expedition visited places around the world, and Darwin studied plants and animals everywhere he went, collecting specimens for further study.
Upon his return to London Darwin conducted thorough research of his notes and specimens. Out of this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single original life form through a branching process called "specialization."
Darwin's theory of evolutionary selection holds that variation within species occurs randomly and that the survival or extinction of each organism is determined by that organism's ability to adapt to its environment. He set these theories forth in his book called, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" (1859) or "The Origin of Species" for short. After publication of Origin of Species, Darwin continued to write on botany, geology, and zoology until his death in 1882. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Darwin's work had a tremendous impact on religious thought. Many people strongly opposed the idea of evolution because it conflicted with their religious convictions. Darwin avoided talking about the theological and sociological aspects of his work, but other writers used his theories to support their own theories about society. Darwin was a reserved, thorough, hard working scholar who concerned himself with the feelings and emotions not only of his family, but friends and peers as well.
It has been supposed that Darwin renounced evolution on his deathbed. Shortly after his death, temperance campaigner and evangelist Lady Elizabeth Hope claimed she visited Darwin at his deathbed, and witnessed the renunciation. Her story was printed in a Boston newspaper and subsequently spread. Lady Hope's story was refuted by Darwin's daughter Henrietta who stated, "I was present at his deathbed ... He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier."
The history of the Ukrainian state is the history of national movement for liberty and independence. Any movement has its heroes, Bohdan Khmelnitskiy is one of them.He was born in 1595 and he is known as a public figure, a general and the Ukrainian Hetman from 1649. Bohdan Khmelnitskiy was a well-educated brilliant man and he knew such languages as: the Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Latin, Turkish and the Tatar language. He had a good knowledge of history, geography and law. He was also good as a soldier.
In 1620 both he and his father took part in the campaign of the Polish army against Turks in Moldova. In the same year he was taken prisoner by the Turks. The captivity lasted for 2 long years. Later he was a member of the Reyester Cossacks Army and the participant of the rebellions of 1637-1638.In 1638-1646 Bohdan Khmelnitskiy was a chegirinskiy sotnik, and later because of persecution of the Polish authorities and he ran away to Zhaporizhkaya Sich where he was the head of the revolt. This revolt gave the beginning to the war for liberty and independence against Poland (1648-1654). He led the army in the great number of successful battles.
On 8 June Bohdan Khmelnitskiy sent the letter to the Russian tsar Alexey Mikhailovich with the request to take Ukraine in Russian authority and to render assistance in the war. As a result of the tremendous efforts the union of Russia and Ukraine became a reality. This agreement has been signed in 1654 on the Pereyaslavskaya Rada.
Bohdan Khmelnitskiy remained a chief of the Hetman administration till his death in 1657.
Folk dumas, historical songs and legends are devoted to him. This man as a hero of the war for liberty and independence is shown in the works of Shevchenko, Grebinka, Franko. The image of Bohdan Khmelnitskiy is widely reflected both in literature, music, movie and theatrical art.
My favourite writer is Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. In my opinion, he is the greatest Russian dramatist and short story writer. I'm never tired of reading and rereading his plays and humorous stories. Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog. In 1879 he went to Moscow, where he studied medicine. Though he practised little as a doctor in his lifetime, he was prouder of his medical knowledge than of his writing talent. While in college, Chekhov wrote humorous sketches for comic papers to support his family. He collected the best ones into a volume Motley Stories, in 1886. The book attracted the attention of the publisher of the Novoje Vremja, Russia's largest paper, and Chekhov was asked to contribute stories regularly. Chekhov, as an established writer, was able to develop a style of his own. Though he never gave up writing comic stories, he began working in a more serious vein. In 1887 Ivanov, his first play, established Chekhov as a dramatist. From then on, he concentrated on writing plays, as well as short stories. Chekhov was seriously ill. He had tuberculosis and knew what it meant. By 1892 his health was so bad that he was afraid to spend another winter in Moscow. He bought a small estate near the village of Melikhovo, 50 miles from Moscow. He spent 5 years there, and those were happy years in spite of the illness. He wrote some of his best stories there, including Ward No.6, several well-known one-act comedies and two of his serious dramatic masterpieces, The Seagull and Uncle Vапуа. The Seagull was first staged in the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg. It was a complete failure because of the dull and clumsy production. It was a cruel blow to Chekhov. However, the play was successfully performed as the first production of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. From then on, Chekhov was closely connected with this theatre and with its founder, K.S. Stanislavsky. In 1901 he married an Art Theatre actress, Olga Knipper, who acted in his play The Three Sisters the same year. Chekhov's health went from bad to worse and he had to spend the remaining years in the Crimea and other health spas. The Cherry Orchard, his last play, was produced in 1904. Soon after the first night Chekhov died. He was 44. several generations of writers, both in Russia and abroad, studied and imitated Chekhov to perfect their own literary style. Chekhov had an immense influence on the 20th century drama.
Andrei Sakharov, an outstanding scientist and public figure, was born on the 21st of May 1921. He graduated from Moscow University in 1942. In 1947 he defended his thesis for the degree of Candidate of Science. In 1953 he defended his Doctorate thesis and was elected member of the Academy of Sciences. Sakharov played a decisive role in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb. While working on the bomb he came to the conclusion that any atomic and nuclear weapons should be banned. He fought courageously for human rights in the former USSR and in 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His international repute as a scientist kept safe for some time, but in 1980 he was deprived of all his titles and orders and exiled to the city of Gorky. There he continued to work for peace, justice and human rights. Only in 1985 Sakharov was allowed to come back to Moscow. He was given back all his titles and 3 years later he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet. But soon he died in 1989. A.D. Sakharov is remembered by everybody as an outstanding humanist and philosopher.
Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man on many contrasts. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, he was cheerful in company but said in private. A lover of mankind, he never had a family or wife to love him. He was a patriotic son of his native land and he died on foreign soil. He invented dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of road mining and road building, but he saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injured his fellow man. During his life he often felt he was useless. He was world famous for his works he was never personally well known, for throughout his life he avoid publicity. But since his death his name brought fame and glory to others.
He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but moved to Russia with his parents in 1842, where his father made a strong position for himself in the engineering industry. Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosions in his father's laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty he was a skillful chemist and excellent linguistics, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English. He builds up over 80 companies in 20 different countries.
But Nobel's main concern was never with making money on scientific discoveries. In youth he had taken a serious interest in literature and psychology. He was always generous to the poor. His greatest wish was to see an end of wars and thus peace between nations. His famous will, in witch he left money to provide prizes for outstanding work in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace.
Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, was born in Scotland in 1881 at a farm. He began to go to school when he was five. In 1895 he went to London and decided to dedicate his life to medicine. At first Fleming wanted to become a surgeon but soon he got interested in bacteriology and decided that he was to find his future in research. Sir Alexander Fleming did not have the life which was outwardly very exciting. He spent his working hours in hospitals and laboratories. He went from home to his laboratory every morning and went home from his laboratory every night. He sat in front of his fire and talked to his wife. He taught his son to swim and to fish. It was life that did not seem to be different from the life of the bank manager or the office worker. But it was not so. The great work that he did was done for the benefit of sick men and women. His discovery of penicillin did more to help suffering mankind than anything else for centuries. When he died in 1955 his old friend said: "…by his work he relieved more suffering than any other living man."
Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847 in a family interested in the problems of speech. Both his father and his grandfather had studied the mechanics of a sound. Bell's father had been one of the pioneer teachers of speech to the deaf. He was a world-famous inventor of "Visible Speech", which helped deaf people to pronounce words they could not hear. Between 1868 and 1870 Alexander worked with his father and studied speech and taught deaf children in Edinburgh. In 1870 he moved to Canada and the next year he went to the USA. In 1866 the nineteen-year-old Bell started thinking about sending tones by telegraph, and it was then that there came to his mind the idea of the "harmonic telegraph", which would send musical tones electrically from one place to another. In 1873 he was appointed a professor at Boston University. He became interested in the mechanical production of a sound, basing his work on the theories of Helmholtz. It seemed to Bell that it was possible to convert the sound wave vibrations into a fluctuating electric current. Then the current, in its turn, can be converted into sound waves identical with the original at the end of the circuit. In this way, sound could be carried across wires at the speed of light. It was through his famous experiments that in 1876 he was able to develop the telephone, which enables people to talk to each other over long distances. One day, while working with an instrument designed to carry sound, Bell automatically cried to his assistant, "Watson, please, come here." Watson, at the other end of the circuit on the other floor, heard the instrument speak and ran downstairs with joy. It was the first telephone communication. In 1915 the first transcontinental telephone was opened. Bell died on August 2, 1922.
Alan Milne was born in London on the 18th of January in 1882. His father was the headmaster of a small preparatory school. One of the teachers at the school was the famous writer H. G. Wells.
Milne went to Westminster School at the age of 11 and then went on to Cambridge to become a mathematician. Instead he become the editor of the university's journal "Granta" in which he published some of his light humorous poems. Then he went to London hoping to earn his living as a writer. At the age of 24 he was given a post of assistant editor of the famous magazine "Punch".
In 1913 he married Dorothy De Selincourt and the following year when the war broke out he joined the Army. The Milnes' only child was born on August 21st 1920. They called their son Christopher Robin. The Milnes bought him a teddy bear for his first birthday. The teddy bear was soon name Winnie, after a real-life bear that lived in London Zoo. A. A. Milne wrote a lot of poems for Christopher Robin and about him.
In eleven days he wrote so many children's poems that they filled a book. It was published in 1924 under name "When We Were Very Young" and sold half a million copies. In 1925 the Milnes bought a farm in Sussex, which they used for weekends away from London. From his old house it was a short walk over a bridge into the Ashdown Forest where Christopher Robin and his teddy, now known by the name of "Winnie-the-Pooh" or "Pooh Bear", used to play. Each daily adventure in the Forest gave A. A. Milne more material for his now famous book "Winnie-the-Pooh" published in 1926. The illustrations to it were done by Ernest Shepard, who drew all the well-loved Pooh characters and places.
In this cartoon we can see again the favourite characters and the places where they live: Christopher Robin, Winnie, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo, Rabbit, Owl.After the book "Winnie-the-Pooh" A. A. Milne wrote another book of children's verses – "Now We Are Six" and "The House at Pooh Corner".
What happened to Winnie-the-Pooh?
Well, the bear was put into the glass case in the museum with all the other toy animals.
After Milne's death in 1956, his widow sold her rights to the Pooh characters to the Walt Disney Company, which has made many Pooh cartoon movies.
In the Soviet Union three cartoons about Winnie and his friends were created from 1969 till 1971 by Fyodor Khitruk
Winnie-the-Pooh was translated by Boris Zakhoder. He was born in 1918 and died in 2000.
As for me, I prefer Disney's version. I think it's more lively, bright.
Agatha Christie was sure the world's best-selling crime writer. Moreover, she was an immensely prolific writer. 79 shot stories, 4 non-fiction ones and 19 plays were written by that strange woman. They were translated into 136 languages. Over 3 billion books by Agatha Christie were sold worldwide. She is popular for ingenuity of plots, which are classical murder mysteries: marooned places and a well-mannered murderer. Her way to present the stories was quite different from that of her colleagues. In the first place, her stories appealed to the readers inside, so you can't find much blood and violence in her stories.
Agatha Christie created two major characters for her stories. Hercule Poirot, a Belgian, used to work in the Police, but by the time of the action he already retired. He can be described as a funny little man taken by many readers as a comic personage. He had a luxurious moustache and he was really proud of it.
Miss Marple was the complete opposite of Poirot. She wasn't a professional and had never been one. She was just an old spinster, very modest but perceptive and not a flamboyant personality, who acted as a detective just by virtue of taking thought.
Agatha Christie's favourite way of murdering was poisoning. She accurately described the process because she had learned a lot about poisons and other chemicals during World War II, while working in a hospital.
The reader has to solve the mystery and decide who the murderer is together with the author. Most of the crimes were committed in some closed surroundings with a limited number of people to suspect. Finally the identity of the murderer is revealed and the reader is hooked and starts looking for another book by Agatha Christie.
Agatha Christie lived between 1890 and 1976. She started writing stories at a very early age, at first to entertain herself. However, she managed to become famous. Not many people know that she used to write under a pen-name of Mary Westmacott. Later, already as a world-known writer, she tried to avoid publicity and stayed out of the public eye.
Lincoln was one of the most famous presidents of the USA. He was born in the family of a poor farmer in 1809 in Kentucky, but soon his family left for the wild forestland of Indiana. He was taught reading, writing and simple arithmetic, as his family could not afford better education. When he was 18, he went to New Orleans and there he saw a slave market. It made a deep impression on him and he began to hate slavery and he decided to fight against it. In 1830 he went to Springfield and became a clerk in a store. He learned much and greatly improved his knowledge. He entered politics and in 1832 became a candidate for the Parliament of the State. Soon he became a force in political life and in 1860 was elected President of the USA. He was an enemy of slavery. Some of the Southern States left the Union, and the war between the South and the North began. At first the war went badly for the North but Lincoln never lost his courage and soon they won. When the war was over, Lincoln issued a proclamation to say that slavery was abolished. Lincoln was well known all over America and everybody loved him. In 1864 he was elected President of the USA for the second time. But his enemies could not let him continue his work. He was shot in a theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865 and died the next day.
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George Boole was born in 1815. He is famous for his works in the field of mathematical analysis. His wife Mary Everest was a niece of George Everest. He is known as a man who performed topographic survey in India on a large scale in 1841. It is after him that the highest peak in the world is named. Mary Everest was interested in her husband's work very much. After his death she published several books that made a great contribution to the development of his theory. The Booles had five daughters, the eldest daughter Mary married C.Hinton who was a well-known mathematician, inventor and author of science-fiction books.
Their three grandchildren became scientists. Howard was a talented entomologist, William and Joan were both physicists. The latter was almost the only woman-physicist who took part in the work at the atomic project of the USA. Their second daughter Margaret is known as mother of the outstanding English mathematician Jeffrey Tailor who is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Their third daughter Alicia was a specialist in the field of multidimensional space. The fourth daughter Lucy was the first woman-professor. She headed the chemistry department. But the youngest daughter Ethel Lilian is the most famous. She married the Polish scientist and revolutionist Voynich. Her wonderful book 'The Gadfly" was translated into many languages and gained popularity in many countries of the world.