The characters in this book are very different people. They don't look much alike–the evil and the kind, the educated and the illiterate, the stingy and the penniless, the innovators and the copyists, the cautious and the adventurous. And the only thing that unites them is that each of them has contributed to the progress of humanity, making the lives of people next to them and their descendants – near and far, like you and me – somehow better, more convenient, more comfortable and more civilized. In other words, these are stories about people that grateful humanity should remember. And in whose lives it is worth looking for role models, on whose experience of successes and mistakes it is worth learning, on whose deeds it is worth reflecting. As it happens, few of the characters in this book are mentioned in history textbooks, and we don't even know about some of them - history is taught to us as a field of action for kings, heroes, and prophets, and the main events in the lives of our ancestors are transmitted through the history of wars and destruction. In general, after reading a history textbook, you may get the impression that people in their lives have only been killing each other and always burning and breaking something, and that life consists solely of destruction, and the meaning of existence is damage.But this, of course, is not the case (to understand this, you just need to look around and see that the balance of "created / broken" is still in favor of "created"), the life of humanity is changing, and changing for the better, even though there are dark and gloomy periods, but not they determine the development of humanity, its priorities and values. Progress is irreversible and natural, and people who find themselves on the crest of a creative wave are the most important characters in the creation of human civilization. However, Human civilization and its creators the stories collected in this book are not just informative reading, there is a modest hope that some of the described situations, actions, decisions may well become a topic for reflection, imitation or evaluation today, because the stories collected here are primarily about people, their the ability to think, make decisions, communicate with others – in short, it's about the practice of making and promoting difficult decisions and positive changes in the world, and all this does not lose its meaning for any of us and never. In short, I would like to hope that the stories collected in this book will not just be stories about past events, but will become an actual story for the reader.