There are many good documentaries on many topics from nation building to examining the life of geniuses.
If you are a fan of a good documentary below is our picks for the best documentaries along with videos to watch them.
Do you have a favorite documentary? Let us know the comments below.
Our Picks for Best Documentaries
- Alexander the Great
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Douglas MacArthur
- Pythagoras
- NIKOLA TESLA
- Beethoven
- Leonardo Da Vinci
- Ludwig Boltzmann
- Isaac Newton
Alexander stands out too many as the best General of all time and studied for his brilliance and Boldness in battle.
Many other great Generals in history have looked at Alexander as the template for what they wanted to become.
Julius Caesar once cried in front of a statue of Alexander which is friends asked him about.
“His friends were surprised, and asked him the reason of it. ‘Do you think,’ said he, ‘I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?’”
Read More Here About Alexander the Great Documentary
Napoleon is a General known for his brilliant tactics.
Born on the island of Corsica he went on to become the best General in French history as well as its Emperor.
He was a lieutenant that command artillery when the French Revolution broke out that would eventually catapult him onto the work stage.
Known for his quick mind he was the first to use canned meals for troops as well as many other ingenious battle innovations.
There is much more to Napoleon than a General from his domineering mother to his final loss at Waterloo his story is one to last the ages.
Read More Here About Napoleon Bonaparte Documentary
Douglas MacArthur was an American five-star general and Field Marshal located in the Philippines. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Philippines Campaign (1944-45).
In 1942, with his position in the Philippines made hopeless by Japan’s destruction of more than half the planes in his Far East Command, MacArthur leaves pledging “I shall return!” MacArthur does return, with riveting victories in the Pacific and the handling of of Japan after the war, he was also armed with Presidential aspirations.
The beginning of an extraordinary career young Douglas with his father General Arthur MacArthur was a Colonel in the Civil War and veteran of the Philippine campaign in the Spanish-American war. He had opportunities to study the entire far eastern area gaining an insight into the attitudes and feelings of people’s hardly known by the West at the beginning of World War.
McArthur was ordered by President Roosevelt who regarded him as our greatest general to leave the Philippines and to carry on the fight from Australia. Leaving the Philippines hurt him deeply as he always wished to be at the front beside his comrades.
Read More Here About Douglas MacArthur Documentary
Pythagoras was a person who reformed and purified Ancient Greece but in his work Pythagoras affects every aspect of our modern life. His great influence is especially surprising when one considers the fact that none of his written works have filtered down to us. Through the expanse of time the fact that no primary sources survived limits our knowledge of him to the writings of others.
Luckily enough many great minds through the ages have studied the man formed opinions of him and written at length.
Pythagoras grew up on the island of Samos in Ionia in the middle of the 6th century BC. Samos was a Greek colony at this time and ruled by the tyrant yet it flourished under the wealth and influence of the ever growing Greek Empire.
Pythagoras recognized his potential, he was happy inquisitive and popular, most boys would probably be educated by their parents. By their fathers they wouldn’t have very much that they needed to know they would tend to know what was necessary for farming and for basic activities. Like that it’s unlikely that most people would ever learn to read, but for the rich things were slightly different, they would be people who had a future as political leaders.
They would expect to be able to speak in public and to engage in social activities with other rich people. The kind of things that they would learn to do would be to read and write to speak in public to play musical instruments and probably to sing and even to compose songs on the spot.
Watch Full Pythagoras Documentary Here
When you think of electricity, you think of Edison,when you think of radio you think of Marconi but there is one electrical genius who is nearly forgotten a man who dreamed of giving the world an unlimited supply of energy his name was Nikola Tesla. He was the master of lightning and this is one of the best documentaries on his story.
The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs Nikola Tesla 1919.
This is the story of a modern Prometheus who change the world with electricity,it was Nikola Tesla who captured the power of Niagara Falls.
With his alternating current system and made it possible to transmit electricity to all of America and the world. It was Tesla who patented the technology for wireless communications that is used in all radio and television broadcasting. His incredible legacy can be seen in everything from remote control to neon
and fluorescent lighting x-rays, guided missiles and even the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Watch Full Tesla Documentary Here
Ludwig Van Beethoven was profoundly deaf for many of his later years. When you remember that as a composer he was unable to hear for me the struggle that comes through Beethoven’s music is what makes it so compelling and struggle was always part of his life just as with Shakespeare.
To this day his music remains as potent obsessive and bewilderingly brilliant and remarkable as ever.
The struggle against deafness, the struggle for personal freedom on every level, the determination to be an artist on his own terms. All this his music visit which against the odds articulates the indomitable power of the human spirit. His music has changed lives it’s changed history with him.
You might say music grew up with Beethoven he was born into a family of court musicians in the German city of Bonn.
Watch Full Beethoven Documentary Here
Few people can rival Leonardo Da Vinci for the title of supreme genius of the ages. Perhaps known first as an artist his paintings the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper are among the most famous recognizable and parodied works of all time.
But Leonardo was the very definition of a Renaissance man in addition to being a visionary painter he was an engineer anatomist and chronicler of science. In fact so vast was his innovations that today some argue that he should be thought of as a scientist first.
Unfortunately, most of his scientific work documented in at least 7,000 pages of notes he left behind remained hidden lost or scattered around various collections for years.
Even centuries after his death and because he didn’t have a lot of formal training Leonardo didn’t know Latin so even during his lifetime he wasn’t able to converse much with the academic world.
Such as it was back then so the weird result of all this is that despite some really pioneering research Leonardo had a minimal impact on the science and technology of his time.
Today thankfully we have put enough of the pieces together from the Leonardo puzzle to really see how ahead of his time he was in many ways and in fact we’re still learning from him.
Watch Full Leonardo Da Vinci Documentary Here
The 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann stirred up controversy by proposing that scientists could make intelligent guesses about the behavior of atoms, which, though they moved randomly, and could be described by certain probabilistic generalizations.
In the 1900s, many illustrious scientists didn’t believe Artemis existed this may sound like a paradox. Today since the 20th century is after all the century of great discoveries on the atomic nature of the world from the electron to current experiments on elementary particles.
Yet prior to the tremendous progress of knowledge Ludwig Boltzmann an Austrian physicist unknown genius and pioneer of atom-ism had to struggle for nearly 40 years ,the final years of the 19th century to make his atomic vision of the world accepted. By the time his life was coming to an end he was indeed considered a great scientist the greatest within Austria.
This however didn’t seem to help. Boltzmann personality was complex and difficult to describe. He himself used to jestingly remind one that he was born during the night between shroud Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.
His moods could swing violently from being extremely happy for not too deeply depressed. Giovanni young Boltzmann used to be an enthusiast, but as the years went by due to personal problems and uncertainty about decisions regarding his career and possibly due to criticism of his scientific work, about which he felt very sensitively.
University of Vienna wrote a letter to inform the competent Minister that Boltzmann suffered from a severe form of neurasthenia and had to give up all scientific activities.
Ludwig Boltzmann was born in Vienna on the 20th of February 1844 the eldest child of a Viennese father of German origin and an Austrian.
He began his scientific career in 1863 at the age of 19, he enrolled at the University of Vienna as a physics and mathematics student receiving his PhD. Only three years later in 1866 in 1867, He became a lecturer at the physics Institute founded 14 years earlier by Christian Doppler.
Watch Full Ludwig Boltzmann Documentary Here
Isaac Newton’s wide range of discoveries, including his groundbreaking work on the laws of motion and gravity, formed the basis for modern physics, but arguably his true genius comes from how he applied those theories to the universe at large, explaining the motions of the Sun and planets in a way that had never been done before.
His book, “Principia Mathematica”, still remains one of the most influential texts in recorded history. In it, Newton breaks down the workings of the solar system, explaining the nature planetary orbits and the pull between heavenly bodies. By describing why the Moon orbits the Earth and not vice-versa, the book literally changed the way people saw the world.
In 1936 a huge collection of scientific documents and personal papers was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in London from the great scientist Isaac Newton. A veritable treasure trove of knowledge to essay starting what these papers have never been seen by the public and a large number of them were bought by the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Many were written in secret code and for six years Keynes struggled to decipher them he hoped they would reveal the private thoughts of the man who invented a new branch of math called calculus, figured out the composition of light, and gave us the laws of gravity and motion which governed the universe.
The man who is considered the founder of modern science Sir Isaac Newton Newton. The Newtonian age and its promised on the concept that everything virtually in the universe was amenable to scientific understanding.
Newton’s work has a beauty and simplicity and an elegance that makes it the greatest work of science ever done.
But what Keynes found shattered his image of Isaac Newton for in these manuscripts Keynes discovered an Isaac Newton unknown to the rest of the world. He found an Isaac Newton who seemed obsessed with religion, alchemy, and devoted to the occult.