Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. King George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.

Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723. As one of ten (maybe eleven) children and the son of the village school-master, Reynolds was restricted to a formal education provided by his father. He exhibited a natural curiosity and, as a boy, came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds made extracts into his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Aphra Behn and passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien. The work that came to have the most influential impact on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson's An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years when it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature ‘J. Reynolds Pictor’.

Joshua (Hebrew: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ‎‎ Yĕhôshúa‘; Greek: Ἰησοῦς, Arabic: يوشع بن نون‎ Yūshaʿ ibn Nūn), is a figure in the Torah, being one of the spies for Israel (Num 13-14) and in few passages as Moses's assistant. He is the central character in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua. According to the books Exodus, Numbers and Joshua, he became the leader of the Israelite tribes after the death of Moses; his name was Hoshe'a the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him Yehoshu'a (Joshua) (Numbers 13:16) the name by which he is commonly known; and he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus, and was probably the same age as Caleb, with whom he is occasionally associated.

He was one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. (Numbers 13:1-16) After the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated the land to the tribes. According to Biblical chronology, Joshua lived between 1500–1390 BCE, or sometime in the late Bronze Age. According to Joshua 24:29, Joshua died at the age of 110.

John Jay (December 12, 1745 – May 17, 1829) was an American statesman, Patriot, diplomat, a Founding Father of the United States, and the first Chief Justice of the United States (1789–95).

Jay was born into a wealthy family of merchants and government officials in New York City. He became a lawyer and joined the New York Committee of Correspondence, and organized opposition to British rule. He joined a conservative political faction that, fearing "mob rule", sought to protect property rights and maintain the "rule of law" while resisting British violations of human rights.

Jay served as the President of the Continental Congress from 1778 to 1779. During and after the American Revolution, Jay was a minister (ambassador) to Spain and France, helping to fashion United States foreign policy. His major diplomatic achievement was to negotiate favorable trade terms with Great Britain in the Jay Treaty of 1794.

Jay, a proponent of strong, centralized government, worked to ratify the new Constitution in New York in 1788 by anonymously writing a few of the Federalist Papers, along with the main authors Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.