Charles Darwin (1809 to 1882)

Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12th, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England, the son of Susannah Wedgwood (of the Wedgwood pottery family) (1765-1817) and Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848), a country physician. Charles's paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who was also a physician and had written books about biology. Although Grandfather Erasmus died before Charles's birth, he seems to have had some influence over the young Darwin.

Although Charles attended the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland, and later the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, to study both medicine and theology, he was not particularly interested in becoming a physician. Instead, he preferred to work on his collection of beetles and to study geology.

In 1831, Darwin embarked on what was to become perhaps the most influential five years of his life. He was invited to be a ship's naturalist on board the H.M.S. Beagle by her captain, Robert Fitz-Roy. The ship was about to embark on a five-year voyage that would circumnavigate (sail completely around) the globe. Darwin did most of his research in South America and in the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador. He collected specimens of insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians, mammals and even fossils. He returned to England in October 1836 and never left the country again.

On returning to England, Darwin set about organizing the specimens he had collected during his five-year journey, preparing them for scientific publications and jotting down notes and ideas. His first notebook contained his ideas on the transmutation of species, including facts and ideas on the origin and transformation of a species through time.

In 1839, Darwin married his cousin Emma Wedgwood and published his first book, Journal of Researches. Between 1839 and 1843, Darwin published Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle in five volumes. Darwin went on to publish Coral Reefs (1842) and Volcanic Islands (1843), about the research he had conducted on the Beagle.

From 1842 to 1844, Darwin worked on two essays about his theories on the change or evolution of species over time. In 1844, he anonymously published Vestiges of Natural Creation, which received such negative criticism that Darwin refused to work up his essay for further publication.

Between 1846 and 1854, Darwin spent his time studying barnacles. He published four volumes covering living and fossilized species of barnacles across the world. In 1854, after eight years of studying barnacles, Darwin returned to theorizing about species transmutation and began work on his two-thousand-page "Big Book."

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