Richard Owen Cambridge, poet, b. 1717. This article says he had “a penchant for writing verse and building boats.”
George Henry Kingsley, physician and world traveller, b. 1827. He wrote about his travels and also educated his daughter, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, at home and allowed her to help him in his scientific studies until his death in 1892. After her father’s death, Mary Henrietta became a world traveller in her own right, especially making several trips to Africa. She wrote Travels in West Africa about the animals, plants and people she encountered in her travels. She died in Africa nursing soldiers during the Boer War.
Graham Hough, literary critic and scholar, b. 1908. “The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that it has no attachment to any of the powers that control the modern world, may set it free to do the only thing that in this age it can do -to keep the neglected parts of the human experience alive until the weather changes; as in some unforeseeable way it may do.”

George Washington Gale Ferris, engineer and inventor, b. 1859. He developed the Ferris wheel for the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Robert Lawson wrote a children’s fiction book called Ferris Wheel that tells the story of this event .
Paul O. Zelinsky, Caldecott award winner and creator of the book The Wheels on the Bus. b. 1953. He’s illustrated some beautiful fairy tale books. Rapunzel is the one he won the Caldecott for, and he’s also done versions of Rumplestilskin and Hansel and Gretel.