Cyrus Field was an American inventor and businessman who, along with other financiers and pioneers, founded the Atlantic Telegraph Company. In 1858, they laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable that connected Great Britain with North America.

James Watt did not invent the telegraph; that honor belongs to Samuel Morse, who also developed Morse Code. James Watt did, however, invent the first reliably functioning and efficient steam engine.

Michel de Montaigne was a French writer who lived in the sixteenth century (1533-1592). He is best remembered for developing the modern essay form. Montaigne wrote short treatments of a wide variety of topics, from historical figures to human nature in general. In his essays, he advocated for rationalism and logical reasoning and demonstrated these traits with the structure and style of his work.

In the fifteenth century, Thomas à Kempis helped spread the ideas of mysticism by writing in the vernacular German language. His most famous work, Imitation of Christ, is an argument in favor of each individual communing directly with God and being able to experience divinity without the assistance of conventional religious structures.

As a part of his sweeping reform of French domestic policy, Napoleon made universal state-sponsored education available to the masses for the first time in the early nineteenth century. Napoleon believed the introduction of universal state-sponsored education would both help the people of France and allow him to recruit more and better military officers.

Positivism is a philosophy built on the belief that quantifiable information attained through scientific experimentation and inductive reasoning is the only source of authoritative knowledge. Auguste Comte stated that the only information people can trust and accept as true must be verifiable through experimentation or be supported by mathematical or scientific reasoning.

Relativism, as a philosophy, has been in existence for many centuries, but only became widely understood and referenced by that name in the nineteenth century. According to relativism, truth is not absolute; rather, it is subjective and informed by the perception of the individual and the circumstances in which the information is perceived.

Miguel de Cervantes wrote possibly the most famous piece of Spanish literature, Don Quixote, in the sixteenth century. Cervantes wrote in vernacular Spanish, and is often credited as among the earliest and most influential proponents of vernacular Spanish as both a language of common interaction and high artistic achievement. Don Quixote remains one of the most lastingly culturally influential pieces of literature in any language; that it was written in vernacular Spanish at a key time in the language's development cannot be overlooked or understated.

Benvenuto Cellini wrote the most famous autobiography of the Renaissance period. His autobiography is celebrated as an early example of high-level life writing, and is also revered by historians for the insight it provides into sixteenth-century Italian life.

Early widely used languages in Europe were Greek and Latin. These languages were commonly used in trade, as they were read and spoken by people of many nations, regardless of their first language. By the time of the Renaissance, Greek and Latin were replaced by vernacular Italian. During the Golden Era of French history, the reign of Louis XIV in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, French became the common language of Europe— spoken by courtiers, diplomats, artists, and intellectuals.