Karl Baedeker was born in Essen in Germany's Ruhr Valley in 1801, the son of a bookseller and printer. He began producing guide-books in Germany after seeing British tourists using John Murray's book in the Rhine Valley. He went on to found the firm of Baedeker and Sons, headquartered in Koblenz, publishing guides in several languages for the leading tourist sites in Europe. Scrupulous and honest, Baedeker never described anything he had not seen and measured himself and indignantly refused bribes for inclusion from tourism operators. He was never convinced of the profitability of his guides, though, and when he died in 1859 Baedeker assumed that his sons would discontinue them. But the distinctive red covered books went from strength to strength and famously survived into the modern day. (By John Osborne)




 

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born to an engineer father in Portsea, near Portsmouth in England in 1806. The most famous engineer of his day, he revolutionized the digging of tunnels, pioneering the machinery used to this day; built a hundred bridges over the most daunting obstacles; laid a thousand miles of railway track; and brought ship-building into the modern era with his all-metal, propeller-driven, steam ships, the Great Britain and the Great Eastern. He suffered a stroke and died ten days later in his home on Duke Street in London. (By John Osborne)

Horace Mann, one of the nation's leading education reformers, died in Yellow Springs, Ohio where he was president of Antioch College. Born on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, he became a champion of the longer school year, free and equal publicly-funded schools staffed with professional teachers, and a wide curriculum free from religious influences, his ideas shaped public education all over the United States. He became president of Antioch in 1853 and established its reputation for egalitarianism, opposing slavery and restrictions on African-Americans, and hiring the first female college faculty member to be paid an equivalent male salary. (By John Osborne)

Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof was born to a Jewish family in the town of Bialystok in Poland, then in Russian ruled Lithuania.  He learned as a child to speak Russian, Polish, German, French, and Hebrew. At nineteen he developed his first ideas about a language that would enhance international communication and before he was thirty, he had published the outlines of his invented language of Esperanto. Zamenhof died in Warsaw in 1917 after a life promoting the language still in use today around the world. (By John Osborne)

Henry McCarty, the young man who grew up to live, and die, as "Billy the Kid," was born on or about this date in the Irish slums of New York City. His mother took him West, first to Indianapolis and then to New Mexico. A killer of at least four men, he was a popular and charismatic young man, fluent in Spanish, and ripe for exaggeration by others in his role as gunman in the Lincoln County War. The manner of his death, shot at the age of twenty-one, sealed his entry into American folklore. (By John Osborne)

John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont the son of a grocer who spent four of his son's first six years of life absent in the Vermont cavalry fighting for the Union. He was educated at the universities of Vermont and Johns Hopkins, where he received his doctorate. A pragmatist, an unswerving democrat, a progressive, and an landmark educational reformer, he became one of the most influential American thinkers in history. He died in 1952. (By John Osborne)

Alfred Dreyfus was born at Mulhausen in Alsace to a prosperous Jewish cotton manufacturer. The family moved to Paris after the loss of the province to Germany in 1871 and Dreyfus was commissioned in the French artillery in 1880. In 1896 he became one of the best-known French officers in the world when he was falsely convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Continued public outcry over a case rife with antisemitism and military bungling saw him win a presidential pardon in 1899. The army eventually overturned his conviction in 1906 and he returned to the artillery. He served in the First World War and died in 1935. (By John Osborne)

August-Marie-Joseph-Jean Jaurès was born to middle class parents in the provincial town of Castres in the Languedoc. Initially a moderate, he became the leading French social democrat, the head of the French Socialist Party, and one of the most famous European progressives of his time. He vehemently opposed the emergence of European war in 1914 and died at the hands of an ultra-patriot assassin the day before France declared war on Germany. (By John Osborne)