Alexander Graham Bell

  

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Born	March 3, 1847 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Died	August 2, 1922 (aged 75) Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, Canada
Cause of death	Complications from Diabetes
Education	University of Edinburgh University College London
Occupation	Inventor Scientist Engineer Professor (Boston University) Teacher of the deaf
Known for	Inventing the Telephone
Spouse	Mabel Hubbard (married 1877–1922)
Children	(4) Two sons who died in infancy and two daughters
Parents	Alexander Melville Bell Eliza Grace Symonds Bell
Relatives	Gardiner Greene Hubbard(father-in-law) Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor (son-in-law) Melville Bell Grosvenor(grandson) Chichester Bell (cousin)
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Early years

Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847.

 The family home was at 16 South Charlotte Street, and now has a commemorative marker at the doorstep, marking it as Alexander Graham Bell's birthplace. He had two brothers: Melville James Bell (1845–1870) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–1867). Both of his brothers died of tuberculosis. His father was Professor Alexander Melville Bell, and his mother was Eliza Grace (née Symonds). Although he was born "Alexander", at age 10, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two brothers. For his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the middle name "Graham", chosen out of admiration for Alexander Graham, a Canadian being treated by his father and boarder who had become a family friend.To close relatives and friends he remained "Aleck" which his father continued to call him into later life.

First invention

As a child, young Alexander displayed a natural curiosity about his world, resulting in gatheringbotanical specimens as well as experimenting even at an early age. His best friend was Ben Herdman, a neighbor whose family operated a flour mill, the scene of many forays. Young Aleck asked what needed to be done at the mill. He was told wheat had to be dehusked through a laborious process and at the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine that was put into operation and used steadily for a number of years.In return, John Herdman gave both boys the run of a small workshop within which to "invent".

From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art, poetry and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family's pianist.Despite being normally quiet and introspective, he reveled in mimicry and "voice tricks" akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits.Bell was also deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness, (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour. He also developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother's forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell's preoccupation with his mother's deafness led him to study acoustics.

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Thomas Edison

   

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Born	Thomas Alva Edison February 11, 1847 Milan, Ohio, United States
Died	October 18, 1931 (aged 84) West Orange, New Jersey, United States
Occupation	Inventor, scientist, businessman
Religion	Deist
Spouse	Mary Stilwell (m. 1871–1884) Mina Miller (m. 1886–1931)
Children	Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965) Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (1876–1935) William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Madeleine Edison (1888–1979) Charles Edison (1890–1969) Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992)
Parents	Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–1896) Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871)
Relatives	Lewis Miller (father-in-law)
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Early life

Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–96, born in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871). His father had to escape from Canada because he took part in the unsuccessful Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837.Edison considered himself to be of Dutch ancestry.In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him "addled". This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." His mother homeschooled him. Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union. Edison developed hearing problems at an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout ofscarlet fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. Around the middle of his career Edison attributed the hearing impairment to being struck on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar caught fire and he was thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals. In his later years he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears.Edison's family was forced to move to Port Huron, Michigan, when the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854,but his life there was bittersweet. He sold candy and newspapers on trains running from Port Huron to Detroit, and he sold vegetables to supplement his income. This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures as he discovered his talents as a businessman. These talents eventually led him to found 14 companies, including General Electric, which is still in existence and is one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world.

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Warren Buffett

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Born	Warren Edward Buffett August 30, 1930 (age 80) Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania University of Nebraska–Lincoln Columbia University
Occupation	Chairman & CEO of Berkshire Hathaway,Investor
Salary	US$100,000
Net worth	US$45 billion (2010)
Spouse	Susan Thompson Buffett (1952–2004) Astrid Menks (2006–present)
Children	Susan Alice Buffett Howard Graham Buffett Peter Andrew Buffett
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Mr. Buffett

“

I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die. (Lowe 1997:165–166)

”

“

A market economy creates some lopsided payoffs to participants. The right endowment of vocal chords, anatomical structure, physical strength, or mental powers can produce enormous piles of claim checks (stocks, bonds, and other forms of capital) on future national output. Proper selection of ancestors similarly can result in lifetime supplies of such tickets upon birth. If zero real investment returns diverted a bit greater portion of the national output from such stockholders to equally worthy and hardworking citizens lacking jackpot-producing talents, it would seem unlikely to pose such an insult to an equitable world as to risk Divine Intervention.

”

““My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well... I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate’s distribution of long straws is wildly capricious.”

. (Buffett Says ‘Capricious’ Economy Requires Charity (Update1) by Hugh Son, Bloomberg, June 16, 2010 16:17 EDT)”

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Mark Zuckerberg

    

    

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Born	Mark Elliot Zuckerberg May 14, 1984 (age 26) White Plains, New York
Residence	Palo Alto, California
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard College (dropped out in 2004)
Occupation	CEO/President of Facebook (24% shareholder in 2010)
Years active	2004–present
Known for	Co-founding Facebook; becoming world's youngest billionaire.
Home town	Dobbs Ferry, New York
Net worth	US$6.9 billion (2010)
Relatives	Randi Zuckerberg (sister)
Awards	Time Person of the Year 2010

Life of this Youngest Billionire

   

  Personal life

Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York to Karen, a psychiatrist, and Edward, a dentist. Mark and three sisters, Randi, Donna, and Arielle, were brought up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Zuckerberg was raised Jewish, including having his bar mitzvah when he turned 13, although he has since described himself as an atheist.
At Ardsley High School he had excelled in the classics before in his junior year transferring to Phillips Exeter Academy, where Zuckerberg won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and Classical studies (on his college application, Zuckerberg listed as non-English languages he could read and write: French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek) and was captain of the fencing team.In college, he was known for reciting lines from epic poems such as The Iliad.
At a party put on by his fraternity during his sophomore year, Zuckerberg met Priscilla Chan, who subsequently became his girlfriend.
 In September 2010, Chan, now a medical student, moved into Zuckerberg's rented Palo Alto house. As of September 2010, Zuckerberg was studying Mandarin with a tutor in preparation for the couple's slated visit to China and possibly to help in setting up operations in China, since Facebook, like Twitter, is blocked by that country's internet firewall.

 

On Zuckerberg's Facebook page, he listed his personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions.

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Bill Gates

  Bill Gates

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Born	October 28, 1955 (age 55) Seattle, Washington, USA
Residence	Medina, WA
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Harvard University (dropped out in 1975)
Occupation	Chairman of Microsoft (non-executive) Chairman of board of Corbis Co-Chair of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Director of Berkshire Hathaway CEO of Cascade Investment
Net worth	US$54 billion (2010)
Spouse	Melinda Gates (m. 1994–present)
Children	3
Parents	William H. Gates, Sr. Mary Maxwell Gates
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Life Moments

Early life
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates, of English, German, and Scottish-Irish descent. His family was upper middle class; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix.^] Early on in his life, Gates' parents had a law career in mind for him.At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine."After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs inFORTRAN, LISP, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.^[18]Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as CEO of Microsoft. In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems, presented in acombinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates' solution, which was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou, held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years;its successor is faster by only one percent^[21]. Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard and spent a lot of time using the school's computers. He remained in contact with Paul Allen, joining him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974The following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a company.

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Steve Jobs

Click Here to read full story Born Steven Paul Jobs February 24, 1955 (age 55) San Francisco,   California, USA Residence Palo Alto, California, USA Nationality American Alma mater Reed  College (dropped out in 1972) Occupation Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc. Board of Directors, Walt Disney Company Salary US$1 Net worth $6.1 billion (2010) Religion Buddhism Spouse Laurene Powell (1991–present) Children 4 Signature Steve's Life "Love What U Do And Do What U Love The Jobs family Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in the city of San Francisco. His  biological mother was an unwed graduate student named Joanne Simpson,  and his biological father was either a political science or mathematics  professor, a native Syrian named Abdulfattah John Jandali. Being born out of wedlock in the puritan America of the 1950s, the baby  was put up for adoption. Joanne had a college education, and she insisted  that the future parents of her boy be just as well educated. Unfortunately,  the candidates, Paul and Clara Jobs, did not meet her expectations: they  were a lower-middle class couple that had settled in the Bay Area after the  war. Paul was a machinist from the Midwest who had not even graduated  from high school. In the end, Joanne agreed to have her baby adopted by  them, under the firm condition that they later send him to college. Paul and Clara called their new son Steven Paul. While Steve was still a  toddler, the couple moved to the Santa Clara county, later to be known as  Silicon Valley. They adopted another baby, a girl called Patti, three years  later in 1958. "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."         Click Here to read full story

Sachin Tendulkar

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Full name	Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar
Born	24 April 1973 (age 37) Bombay, Maharashtra, India
Nickname	The God of Cricket, Little Master, Tendlya, Master Blaster, The Master,The Little Champion,The Great Man
Height	5 ft 5 in (1.65 m)
Batting style	Right-handed
Bowling style	Right-arm leg spin, off spin, medium pace
Role	Batsman
International information
National side	India
Test debut(cap 187)	15 November 1989 v Pakistan
Last Test	9 October 2010 v Australia
ODI debut(cap 74)	18 December 1989 v Pakistan
Last ODI	24 February 2010 v South Africa
ODI shirt no.	10
Domestic team information
Years	Team
1988–present	Mumbai
2008–present	Mumbai Indians (Indian Premier League)
1992	Yorkshire
Career statistics
Competition	Test	ODI	FC	LA
Matches	175	442	278	529
Runs scored	14,513	17,594	23,406	21,150
Batting average	56.91	45.12	59.86	45.87
100s/50s	50/59	46/93	77/105	57/111
Top score	248*	200*	248*	200*
Balls bowled	4,078	8,020	7,443	10,196
Wickets	44	154	69	201
Bowling average	53.93	44.26	61.81	42.01
5 wickets ininnings	0	2	0	2
10 wickets in match	0	n/a	0	n/a
Best bowling	3/10	5/32	3/10	5/32
Catches/stumpings	106/–	132/–	174/–	169/–

    

Early years and personal life

Tendulkar was born in Bombay (now Mumbai). His father, Ramesh Tendulkar, a Marathi novelist, named Tendulkar after his favourite music director, Sachin Dev Burman. Tendulkar's elder brother Ajit encouraged him to play cricket. Tendulkar has two other siblings: a brother Nitin, and sister Savita.

Tendulkar attended Sharadashram Vidyamandir (High School),where he began his cricketing career under the guidance of his coach and mentor, Ramakant Achrekar. During his school days he attended the MRF Pace Foundation to train as a fast bowler, but Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee, who took a world record 355 Test wickets, was unimpressed, suggesting that Tendulkar focus on his batting instead.

When he was young, Tendulkar would practice for hours on end in the nets. If he became exhausted, Achrekar would put a one-Rupee-coin on the top of the stumps, and the bowler who dismissed Tendulkar would get the coin. If Tendulkar passed the whole session without getting dismissed, the coach would give him the coin. Tendulkar now considers the 13 coins he won then as some of his most prized possessions.

While at school, he developed a reputation as a child prodigy. He had become a common conversation point in Mumbai circles, where there were suggestions already that he would become one of the greats. His season in 1988 was extraordinary, with Tendulkar scoring a century in every innings he played. He was involved in an unbroken 664-run partnership in a Lord Harris Shield inter-school game in 1988 with friend and team mate Vinod Kambli, who would also go on to represent India. The destructive pair reduced one bowler to tears and made the rest of the opposition unwilling to continue the game. Tendulkar scored 326* in this innings and scored over a thousand runs in the tournament. This was a record partnership in any form of cricket until 2006, when it was broken by two under-13 batsmen in a match held at Hyderabad in India.

When he was 14, Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar gave him a pair of his own ultra light pads. "It was the greatest source of encouragement for me," he said nearly 20 years later after surpassing Gavaskar's world record of 34 Test centuries. On 24 May 1995,Sachin Tendulkar married Anjali, a paediatrician and daughter of Gujarati industrialist Anand Mehta. They have two children, Sara (born 12 October 1997), and Arjun (born 24 September 1999).

Tendulkar sponsors 200 underprivileged children every year through Apnalaya, a Mumbai-based NGO associated with his mother-in-law, Annabel Mehta.

  
           

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