Items28The creator’s order
  1. 1Nicolaus CopernicusNicolaus CopernicusNicolaus Copernicus, a canon of Frombork Cathedral who practised medicine and administration, worked for decades on his sun-centred model of the planets while circulating only a short outline. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was finally printed in 1543, when he was 70; tradition says he…0i
  2. 2Galileo GalileiGalileo GalileiBorn 15 Feb 1564Galileo Galilei wrote Two New Sciences while under house arrest after his 1633 trial, and it was smuggled to Leiden for publication in 1638, when he was 74 and going blind. It sets out his work on the strength of materials and on motion, including falling bodies and projectiles, and is often seen…0i
  3. 3Daniel DefoeDaniel DefoeDaniel Defoe had been a merchant, bankrupt, pamphleteer, government spy and prisoner before he published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, at about 59. Its success led to Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year within three years. His decades of journalism and political writing gave him the plain,…0i
  4. 4John HarrisonJohn HarrisonJohn Harrison, a self-taught carpenter and clockmaker from Lincolnshire, spent some thirty years building increasingly refined sea clocks to solve the longitude problem. His breakthrough, the watch-sized H4, was completed around 1759 when he was in his mid-sixties, and kept accurate time on a 1761…0i
  5. 5Immanuel KantImmanuel KantBorn 22 Apr 1724Immanuel Kant spent most of his career as a respected but unremarkable lecturer in Königsberg, then published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, aged 57, after more than a decade of near silence. The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of Judgement (1790) followed. Almost…0i
  6. 6Joseph HaydnJoseph HaydnJoseph Haydn spent nearly thirty years as court composer to the Esterházy family, then, freed in 1790, travelled to London, where he wrote the twelve London symphonies in his early sixties. The oratorio The Creation followed in 1798, when he was 66, and remains among the most performed choral…0i
  7. 7HokusaiHokusaiHokusai had been working as a print designer and painter for half a century before producing Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji around 1830 to 1832, in his early seventies; it includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa. He wrote that nothing he made before seventy was worth noticing and hoped to improve…0i
  8. 8Peter Mark RogetPeter Mark RogetBorn 18 Jan 1779Peter Mark Roget was a physician who had kept a private list of words grouped by meaning since his twenties. After retiring from medicine he expanded it into the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, published in 1852 when he was 73. He kept revising it through dozens of printings until his death…0i
  9. 9Anna SewellAnna SewellBorn 30 Mar 1820Anna Sewell, housebound by illness for much of her life, wrote Black Beauty in her fifties, dictating parts to her mother, and it was published in 1877 when she was 57. She died five months later. Written to encourage kinder treatment of horses, it became one of the best-selling books of its…0i
  10. 10Giuseppe VerdiGiuseppe VerdiGiuseppe Verdi seemed to have retired after Aida, but his publisher and the composer and librettist Arrigo Boito coaxed him back. Otello premiered in 1887, when he was 73, and the comedy Falstaff in 1893, when he was 79. Many critics rank them as his finest operas, more continuous and dramatic than…0i