(February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) Lincoln was the 16th President of the , serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln successfully led his country through its greatest constitutional, military and moral crisis preserving the Union while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization. Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated, and became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator during the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives during the 1840s. After a series of debates in 1858 that gave national visibility to his opposition to the expansion of slavery, Lincoln lost a Senate race to his arch- rival, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln, a moderate from a swing state, secured the Republican Party nomination. With almost no support in the South, Lincoln swept the North and was elected president in 1860. His election was the signal for seven southern slave states to declare their secession from the Union and form the Confederacy. The departure of the Southerners gave Lincoln's party firm control of Congress, but no formula for compromise or reconciliation was found, and the war came. He reached out to War Democrats and managed his own re-election in the 1864 presidential election. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican party, Lincoln found his policies and personality were "blasted from all sides": Radical Republicans demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats desired more compromise, Copperheads despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists plotted his death. His Gettysburg Address of 1863 became the most quoted speech in American history. It was an iconic statement of America's dedication to the principles of nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy.

(April 13, 1743- July 4, 1826) Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, third president of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia, voiced the aspirations of a new America as no other individual of his era. As public official, historian, philosopher, and plantation owner, he served his country for over five decades. Jefferson practiced law and served in local government as a magistrate, county lieutenant, and member of the House of Burgesses in his early professional life. As a member of the Continental Congress, he was chosen in 1776 to draft the Declaration of Independence, which has been regarded ever since as a charter of American and universal liberties. The document proclaims that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status, and that the government is the servant, not the master, of the people.

In 1790 he accepted the post of secretary of state under his friend George Washington. His tenure was marked by his opposition to the pro-British policies of Alexander Hamilton. In 1796, as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Republicans, he became vice-president after losing to John Adams by three electoral votes.

Jefferson was succeeded as president in 1809 by his friend James Madison, and during the last seventeen years of his life, he remained at Monticello. During this period, he sold his collection of books to the government to form the nucleus of the Library of Congress. Jefferson embarked on his last great public service at the age of seventy-six, with the founding of the University of Virginia. He spearheaded the legislative campaign for its charter, secured its location, designed its buildings, planned its curriculum, and served as the first rector.

(February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799)

Washington was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, serving as the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War and later as the new republic's first President. He also presided over the convention that drafted the Constitution. Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named for him, as is the State of Washington on the nation's Pacific Coast. Washington had a vision of a great and powerful nation that would be built on republican lines using federal power. He sought to use the national government to preserve liberty, improve infrastructure, open the western lands, promote commerce, found a permanent capital, reduce regional tensions and promote a spirit of American nationalism. At his death, Washington was hailed as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen". The Federalists made him the symbol of their party but for many years, the Jeffersonians continued to distrust his influence and delayed building the Washington Monument. As the leader of the first successful revolution against a colonial empire in world history, Washington became an international icon for liberation and nationalism, especially in France and Latin America. He is consistently ranked among the top three presidents of the United States, according to polls of both scholars and the general public.

(1811-1877) An American pioneer railroad builder in and , Henry Meiggs was born in Catskill, N.Y., on July 7, 1811. He went into the business of providing transport for the gold miners and quickly succeeded in accumulating a fortune which he lost even more quickly than he had acquired it. Meiggs next turned up in Chile. He was soon active in planning and executing projects for building bridges and establishing the first extensive railroad lines in his new homeland. He worked very closely with the governments of the time and earned a new fortune from these activities. His crowning achievement in Chile was the completion in 1863 of the railroad linking the capital city of with its port on the Pacific Ocean, Valparaiso.

In 1868 Meiggs moved to Peru. The country was in the grip of a railroad-building fever, and President José Balta was extremely interested both in having railroads constructed.

While Meiggs was busy in Peru, he was approached by President Tomás Guardia of Costa Rica, who proposed construction of a railroad from the Caribbean port of Limón to the national capital, San José, in the Central Plateau. Although Meiggs received a contract for the construction of this road, the enterprise was actually carried out by one of his nephews, Minor Cooper Keith, and it was completed 14 years after Meiggs's death, in on Sept. 29, 1877. This was due to the murder of President Balta in 1872 and the serious undermining of the financial stability of Peru in the middle 1870s, resulting in the unwillingness and inability of the Peruvian government to complete its payments to the American plunger and railroad man.

(August 20, 1778-October 24, 1842) O’Higgins was a Chilean landowner and one of the leaders of its struggle for Independence. Although he had no formal military training, O'Higgins took charge of the ragged rebel army and fought the Spanish from 1810 to 1818 when Chile finally achieved its Independence. Today, he is revered as the liberator of Chile and the father of the nation.

Bernardo was the illegitimate child of Ambrosio O'Higgins, an Irishman who immigrated to the New World and rose in the ranks of the Spanish bureaucracy, eventually reaching the high post of Viceroy of Peru. As a young man, he went to , where he lived on a pittance that his father sent him. While there, Bernardo was tutored by legendary Venezuelan Revolutionary Francisco de Miranda.

O'Higgins was an important supporter of the September 18 movement in Chile which began the nations' struggle for Independence. When it became apparent that the actions of Chile would lead to war, he raised two cavalry regiments and an infantry militia, mostly recruited from families who worked his lands. As he had no training, he learned how to use weapons from veteran soldiers. Juan Martinez de Rozas was President, and O'Higgins supported him, but Rozas was accused of corruption and criticized for sending valuable troops and resources to Argentina to help the independence movement there. In July of 1811 Rozas stepped down, replaced by a moderate junta.

O'Higgins turned the tide of the battle and emerged a national hero. The ruling junta in Santiago had seen enough of Carrera after his fiasco at Chillán and his cowardice at El Roble and made O'Higgins commander of the army. O'Higgins, argued against the move, saying that a change of high command was a bad idea, but the junta had decided: O'Higgins would lead the army.

( July 8, 1850 - June 12 ,1939) Humberstone was an English chemistry engineer, who arrived to America in 1875, to work in offices of salitre of Tarapaca and Chile, giving important advances in that industry. He was born in Dover, England. When he was born he moved to with his family, where he studied engineer. When he was 17, he worked in a rail-road called London Nothwestem, there he learnt Mechanic and chemistry.

In 1878, he developed a new system called Shanks, to elaborate sodium carbonate. This new system was implemented in every office of salitre.

In 1879, while the Pacific war was begun, many workers of salitre went away for safelty because the Chilean military, one of them was Humberstone, who was a close friend of Bolivian president, Hilarión Daza. Thanks to his system to find water of machines in the dessert, he became in a trust man to one of the most important men in salitre industry, John Thomas North, who named Humberstone as administrator of many offices.

Humbestone was called as “the father of salitre” and he changed his name to Santiago, which is the Spanish translation. In 1936, the King George VI of England gave him the order of Britain Empire. Finally, he died in , on June 12th, 1939.

(January, 1898- March, 1898)

Sir Henry Bessemer was born in England, in January 19th, 1898. He was an engineer, pioneer in modern iron and steel industry; he fused types of printer machines and inventor of steel polishing process that has his name. While the Crimea war, he invented a missile of artillery very effective, however the military experts informed that the canyons of fused iron of the time were not able to resist the hardness of this new missile.

In 1855, Bessemer patented a process of polishing and reduction of iron to produce steel in industry quantities and low costs. The impact of this invent, in the context of Industrial Revolution, was huge. While the industry of train and manufacturing machines was born, he got a prime material plentiful and chip.

Thanks to Bessemer, you can see steel ships, bridges, trains and buildings, for example, that means, everything that was characteristic of XIX and XX century

(15th August 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica -Died: 5th May 1821 on St. Helena)

Married (Josephine): 9th March 1796 in Paris, France / Married (Marie-Louise): 2nd April 1810 in Paris, France

First Consul of France: 1799 - 1804

Emperor of the French: 1804 - 1814, 1815.

He was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815. His legal reform, the Napoleonic Code, has been a major influence on many civil law jurisdictions worldwide, but he is best remembered for his role in the wars led against France by a series of coalitions, the so-called Napoleonic Wars. He established hegemony over most of continental Europe and sought to spread the ideals of the French Revolution, while consolidating an imperial monarchy which restored aspects of the deposed Ancien Régime. Due to his success in these wars, often against numerically superior enemies, and his campaigns are studied at military academies throughout much of the world. Napoleon Bonaparte was the twice-emperor of France whose military endeavors and sheer personality dominated Europe in person for a decade, and in thought for a century. Napoleon spent the last six years of his life in confinement by the British on the island of Saint Helena. An autopsy concluded he died of stomach cancer. There has been debate about his death, as some scholars have held that he was a victim of arsenic poisoning.

(April 28, 1758 – July 4, 1831)

He was the fifth President of the United States (1817–1825). Monroe was the last president who was a Founding Father of the United States, the third of them to die on Independence Day. His presidency was marked both by an "Era of Good Feelings" – a period of relatively little partisan strife – and later by the Panic of 1819 and a fierce national debate over conditions of the admission of the Missouri Territory. Monroe is most noted for his foreign policy proclamation in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, which stated that the United States would not tolerate further European intervention in the Americas.

Born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, Monroe was of the planter class and fought in the American Revolutionary War. He was injured in the Battle of Trenton with a musket ball to his shoulder. Facing little opposition from the fractured Federalist Party, Monroe was easily elected president in 1816, winning over 80 percent of the electoral vote and becoming the last president during the First Party System era of American politics. In 1823, he announced the Monroe Doctrine, which became a landmark in American foreign policy. His presidency concluded the first period of American presidential history before the beginning of Jacksonian democracy and the Second Party System era.. He died in on July 4, 1831.

(March 16, 1751 (O.S. March 5) – June 28, 1836) He was an American statesman and political theorist, the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817). He is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for being instrumental in the drafting of the United States Constitution and as the key champion and author of the United States Bill of Rights he was a slaveholder and part of the élite; he inherited his plantation known as Montpelier, and owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime to cultivate tobacco and other crops. In 1789, Madison became a leader in the new House of Representatives, drafting many basic laws. He is notable for drafting the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and thus is known as the "Father of the Bill of Rights". Madison worked closely with President George Washington to organize the new federal government. As president (1809–17), after the failure of diplomatic protests and a trade embargo against Great Britain, he led the nation into the War of 1812. He was responding to British encroachments on American honor and rights; in addition, he wanted to end the influence of the British among their Indian allies, whose resistance blocked United States settlement in the Midwest around the Great Lakes. Madison found the war to be an administrative nightmare, as the United States had neither a strong army nor financial system; as a result, he afterward supported a stronger national government and a strong military, as well as the national bank, which he had long opposed.