When compelled on bended knee to publicly renounce his heretical doctrine that the earth moves around the sun, all the terrors of the Inquisition could not keep this feeble man of threescore years and ten from muttering to himself, "Yet it does move." When thrown into prison, so great was his eagerness for scientific research that he proved by a straws in his cell that a hollow tube is relatively much stronger than a solid rod of the same size.

Even when totally blind, he kept constantly at work.
Imagine the surprise of the Royal Society of England when the poor unknown Herschel sent in the report of his discovery of the star Georgium Sidus, its orbit and rate of motion; and of the rings and satellites of Saturn.

The boy with no chance, who had played the oboe for his meals, had with his own hands made the telescope through which he discovered facts unknown to the best-equipped astronomers of his day.

He had ground two hundred specula before he could get one perfect.
George Stephenson was one of eight children whose parents were so poor that all lived in a single room.

George had to watch cows for a neighbor, but he managed to get time to make engines of clay, with hemlock sticks for pipes.