Mary Golda Ross moved from calculating aircraft loads to charting routes toward Mars and Venus, while much of the work between remained classified.

Before satellites could tell a receiver where it stood, Gladys West helped mathematics describe the uneven planet beneath them.

Beatrix Potter's early miniature worlds were fungal cells under a microscope, not rabbits in waistcoats.

Theo Jansen's beach animals have bones made of yellow tubing and muscles supplied by North Sea wind.

Wilson Bentley caught snow crystals and refined microphotography techniques that preserved their structures before they melted.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power developed glass enclosures to observe living marine animals and test how the paper nautilus forms its shell.

Nellie Bly exposed conditions inside Blackwell's Island asylum and later completed a highly publicized trip around the world.

An eccentric American merchant repeatedly made profits from trades that appeared absurd to his contemporaries.

In 1898, a young English accountant named W.