January 22

Lord Chancellor of England and founder of the empirical scientific method, Bacon argued in Novum Organum (1620) that knowledge must be built on systematic observation and experiment rather than received authority — the philosophical foundation of modern science. He was also convicted of accepting bribes and spent his final years in disgrace, writing and conducting experiments including one that led directly to his death from pneumonia.

The most celebrated poet of the Romantic movement and one of the most famous people in early-nineteenth-century Europe, Byron wrote Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and She Walks in Beauty. His life was as dramatic as his verse — he died at 36 in Greece, where he had gone to fight for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.

One of the pioneers of soul music, Cooke had a string of pop and R&B hits including You Send Me, Chain Gang, and Wonderful World, before recording A Change Is Gonna Come — a hymn of the civil rights movement released days after his death. He was shot and killed in a Los Angeles motel in December 1964 under disputed circumstances. He was 33.

A pioneering filmmaker who invented or refined much of the grammar of cinema — the close-up, the cross-cut, the fade — Griffith directed The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). His technical innovations were groundbreaking; The Birth of a Nation's glorification of the Ku Klux Klan was equally influential in the wrong direction, directly contributing to the Klan's twentieth-century revival.