The 19th century

Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

Clockmaker turned mental healer whose notebooks seeded the entire New Thought movement.

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

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

First existentialist; wrote on anxiety, despair and the leap of faith.

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

Swedenborgian minister who wrote the first systematic books of mental-cure philosophy.

Proved handwashing saves mothers' lives; ridiculed and died in an asylum.

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.

Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.

The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.

Took the reader inside the mind that has decided to do the terrible thing.

Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.

Pea plants in a monastery garden gave the world genetics.

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

A Doll's House detonated 19th-century assumptions about marriage.

1,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.

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

The four-stroke engine that moved the 20th century.

Invented dynamite, then endowed the prizes to redeem the legacy.

Identified the mosquito as the vector of yellow fever.

Arranged the elements so precisely that he could describe ones nobody had found.

Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.

Built modern steel and then invented large-scale philanthropy.

Wrote a novel narrated by a dead man in 1881; Brazil's greatest writer.

Founded Indian heavy industry and the philanthropic corporate model behind it.

Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.

The silver stain that made neurons visible.

Built and patented the first practical automobile.

Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.

Proved there are different sizes of infinity.

Her recovery from tuberculosis through affirmative prayer began the Unity movement.

1,093 patents and the industrial research laboratory itself.

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

Won the world's first national women's vote in 1893.

The 'teacher of teachers' who trained the founders of Unity, Divine Science and Religious Science.

Founded neuroscience by drawing the neuron doctrine.

Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.

Co-founded Unity with Myrtle Fillmore in 1889; built its prayer ministry and publishing house.

Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.

Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.

Scientific management — the origin of every productivity metric and its discontents.

Quantised energy and started quantum theory.

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Pragmatist whose learning-by-doing reshaped schools on every continent.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

First great synthesiser of Chinese and Western medicine; his case records still teach clinicians.

The Science of Getting Rich turned New Thought toward prosperity and later inspired The Secret.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Ophthalmologist whose novels ignited the Philippine revolution; executed at 35.

Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.

Co-founded Divine Science and its Denver college of practitioners.

Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.

The moving assembly line and the five-dollar day created mass consumer industry.

Crop rotation and peanut science that rescued Southern soil and farmers.

Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.

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

Three Principles of the People underwrote the republican transformation of China.

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Built a national cosmetics company and became America's first self-made Black woman millionaire.

Ammonia synthesis feeds around half of humanity; also weaponised chlorine gas.

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

Physician of Unani medicine who built its modern colleges and led the Indian National Congress.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Isolated a pancreatic hormone before the Toronto insulin team.

Founded Arya Vaidya Sala at Kottakkal and industrialised classical Ayurvedic pharmacy.

Dentist whose global survey of traditional diets tied refined food to physical degeneration.

Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.

Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.

Eradicated yellow fever from Rio and founded Brazilian public health.

German émigré who founded American naturopathy and its first college in 1902.

Flew the first publicly witnessed powered aircraft in Europe.

Made radio a transatlantic reality.

Co-authored the founding text of anthroposophic medicine and opened its first clinic in Arlesheim.

Poet-philosopher who conceived the idea of Pakistan.

Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.

French consul in China whose L'Acuponcture Chinoise opened the practice to Europe.

Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.

Described a disease, its parasite and its vector single-handedly.

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

Founded modern Chinese literature and diagnosed a nation in vernacular prose.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

Noether's theorem links symmetry to conservation laws — the backbone of modern physics.

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

Ulysses reorganised what a novel could attempt.

Kristin Lavransdatter; medieval Norway rendered with modern psychology.

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

Gave bureaucratic dread an adjective in every major language.

Creative destruction — the standard account of how innovation reshapes industries.

Think and Grow Rich carried New Thought into business self-help; his sourcing remains disputed.

Quantum atom and the Copenhagen interpretation.

The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.

Filled New York auditoriums in the Depression; his writing shaped early Alcoholics Anonymous.

Self-taught genius whose notebooks still yield theorems a century later.

Built the world's first seed bank; starved to death in Stalin's prison.

Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.

First Latin American science laureate; pituitary role in glucose metabolism.

Founded Religious Science and wrote The Science of Mind, its systematic textbook.

Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.

Rebuilt Hebrew as a modern literary language.

Wrote as dozens of invented authors; The Book of Disquiet.

Requiem memorised by friends because writing it down was fatal.

First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.

Twice redirected philosophy — first with logical form, then with language as use.

Wrote Vietnam's declaration of independence quoting Jefferson.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

Co-discovered insulin and sold the patent for one dollar.

Discovered pantothenic acid and argued for biochemical individuality — the idea beneath functional medicine.

Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.

Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.

Poet and dramatist murdered by fascists; Spain's enduring wound.

Turned penicillin from curiosity into mass-manufactured medicine.

Cumulative causation and the economics of racial inequality in America.

The Power of Positive Thinking sold tens of millions and mainstreamed the movement.

Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.

First Japanese literature laureate; Snow Country and The Old Capital.

Stripped English prose to the bone.

Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.

El Señor Presidente invented the Latin American dictator novel.

Acquired immune tolerance, the basis of transplantation.

Prices as information; the intellectual engine of late-century market liberalism.

Rescued acupuncture from abolition and rebuilt it on anatomical terms with filiform needles.

Statistical quality control rebuilt Japanese manufacturing and then global industry.

Revived Kampo in Japan and secured its place inside the national health insurance system.