Re:Some Ideas - with links (Score 1)

Many of Encyclopedia Britannica's science articles are available for free, so that might be a good place to start:

• Madame Curie
• Grace Hopper
• (There are a few women of Astronomy from around 1900 who should be interesting, but I don't know names) [How about Margaret Burbidge?]
• Richard Feynman
• Charles Darwin
• Gregor Mendel
• Murray Gell-Mann
• Linus Pauling
• Benjamin Franklin
• Paul Erdos
• [Roald] Hoffman (nobel science and literature)
• [Jacob] Perkins, inventor of the first synthetic dyestuff
• Antoine Lavoisier
• William Thompson (Lord Kelvin)
• Thomas Edison
• Michael Faraday (give them a crack at his "The Chemical History of the Candle")
• [Jacques Cousteau]
• John Holland (computer science) [There's also John Philip Holland, a marine engineer.]
• Walther Flemming (discoverer of penicillian)
• Pres. Calvin Coolidge (mining engineer, gave one of the best descriptions of the joy of engineering I've ever seen)