United Kingdom: the essential lives

Made English a literary language with The Canterbury Tales.

Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.

Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.

Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.

Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.

The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.

Invented vaccination; smallpox is the only human disease ever eradicated.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.

Population pressure as an economic law; the argument every food and climate debate revisits.

Comparative advantage and rent theory — still the core argument for trade.

Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.

A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.

Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.

Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.

Explained the whole of life with one mechanism: descent with modification.

Wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine and saw computing beyond numbers.

Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.

Indian-service judge whose Edinburgh Lectures gave New Thought a systematic metaphysics.

Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.

Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.

Argued governments should spend in a slump — and every modern state now does.

Imperfect competition and a lifelong challenge to orthodox capital theory.

Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin by X-ray.

Defined what a computer is, then was destroyed by the country he saved.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Co-described the double helix and the central dogma of molecular biology.

The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.

Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.

Founded Five Element acupuncture and the colleges that carried it across the English-speaking world.

Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.

Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.

Wrote the web and gave it away for nothing.