How Taylor Swift Changed Music

1. A songwriter first: the Nashville years

Taylor Alison Swift was born on 13 December 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a Christmas tree farm before her family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, when she was fourteen so that she could pursue a career in country music. She signed with Big Machine Records in 2005 and released her debut album, Taylor Swift, in 2006, at the age of sixteen. The album's songs, including Tim McGraw and Teardrops on My Guitar, were written largely by Swift herself, and they established the quality that would define her whole career: a gift for writing lyrics that sound like a conversation, specific in their detail and direct in their emotion. Country music had always valued storytelling, but Swift's stories were those of a teenager, told in a teenager's voice, and they reached an audience of young listeners who had rarely heard themselves in country songs.

Her second album, Fearless, released in 2008, won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, making her the youngest artist to win the award at the time, and it produced the singles Love Story and You Belong with Me, which crossed over from country radio to pop radio. Her third album, Speak Now, released in 2010, was written entirely by herself, a deliberate statement that she was a songwriter first and a performer second. In an industry where pop stars often relied on teams of writers, Swift's insistence on writing her own songs, and on being credited for them, set her apart, and it gave her a credibility with critics and with other songwriters that became one of the foundations of her influence. The Country Music Association named her its Entertainer of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011.

What Swift changed in those early years was the idea of who a country star could be. She brought the confessional style of the singer-songwriter into mainstream country, she wrote about teenage life without talking down to her audience, and she built a direct relationship with her fans through social media, answering messages and sharing details of her life in a way that was new at the time. Her fans, who call themselves Swifties, became one of the most organised fan communities in music, and their loyalty gave her a power that record companies had to reckon with. That power would matter enormously when her career reached its first great crisis, over the ownership of her recordings.

2. From country to pop, and the reinvention of the album

With Red, released in 2012, Swift began to move from country to pop, working with the Swedish producers Max Martin and Shellback on songs such as We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together and I Knew You Were Trouble. With 1989, released in 2014, she completed the move, making a full pop album that won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, her second win in the category. The album's singles, including Shake It Off, Blank Space and Bad Blood, dominated pop radio, and the 1989 World Tour became one of the highest-grossing tours of its year. Swift's move showed that a star could change genre completely without losing her audience, and it showed the industry that a pop album could be treated as a complete artistic statement rather than a collection of singles.

Reputation, released in 2017, was a darker record, written in response to a public feud with the rapper Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian, and to a period in which Swift withdrew from public life. Lover, released in 2019, was a return to a brighter sound and was her first album on her new label, Republic Records, after her contract with Big Machine ended. During the COVID-19 pandemic she released two folk albums, Folklore and Evermore, in 2020, recorded largely in collaboration with Aaron Dessner of the band The National and with her long-time collaborator Jack Antonoff. Folklore won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, her third win, and the two albums showed that she could work in a quiet, understated style as successfully as in pop. Midnights, released in 2022, won her a fourth Album of the Year Grammy, making her the first artist to win in that category four times.

Through these changes, Swift kept control of the album as a form. At a time when streaming was pushing the industry towards singles, she released albums that were designed to be heard as wholes, with a clear narrative and a visual identity for each one. Each album came with a colour, a style and a mood, and her fans learned to read the clues she planted in lyrics, videos and social media posts. That practice, which fans call Easter eggs, turned the release of an album into an event that fans could participate in, and it has been copied by many other artists. The album era, as Swift practises it, is not a relic of the past but a form she has kept alive in the streaming age.

3. The re-recordings: ownership becomes the story

The most consequential change Swift made to the music industry came not from a song but from a business dispute. When she left Big Machine Records in 2018, the rights to her first six albums, the master recordings, stayed with the label. In 2019 the label was sold to the music manager Scooter Braun, a man with whom Swift had a public dispute, and the masters were later sold again, to a private equity firm. Swift said that she had not been given a fair chance to buy her own work, and she announced that she would re-record her first six albums, releasing them as Taylor's Version, so that the new recordings would replace the old ones in films, advertisements and streaming. She released Fearless (Taylor's Version) and Red (Taylor's Version) in 2021, Speak Now (Taylor's Version) and 1989 (Taylor's Version) in 2023.

The re-recording project changed the industry in two ways. First, it showed artists that ownership of their recordings mattered, and that re-recording was a practical way to reclaim it. Record labels responded by changing their contracts, in some cases requiring artists to wait longer before they could re-record, a change that showed how seriously the industry took the threat. Second, it showed that fans would follow an artist to the new versions: the re-recordings were commercially successful, and the songs from the vault, previously unreleased tracks included on the new albums, became events in their own right. The most famous of these was the ten-minute version of All Too Well, released on Red (Taylor's Version), which became one of her most celebrated songs and the subject of a short film she directed herself.

In May 2025 Swift announced that she had bought back her original master recordings, ending the dispute that had driven the re-recording project. The announcement was a victory for her, and it closed a chapter that had lasted six years, but the project itself had already done its work: it had made the ownership of recordings a public issue, it had given other artists a model to follow, and it had shown that an artist with a loyal audience could challenge the structure of the industry and win. The re-recording of her 2006 debut album was confirmed as complete in her May 2025 letter, though no release date had been set, and Swift's control of her catalogue is now complete. Few business disputes in the history of popular music have had such a lasting effect on how contracts are written.

4. The Eras Tour: the concert as a cultural event

The Eras Tour, which ran from March 2023 to December 2024, was the most ambitious concert tour of Swift's career and one of the most successful tours in history. The show lasted more than three hours and was built around the idea of eras, with each section devoted to one of her albums, from her country beginnings to her latest pop and folk records. The staging was elaborate, with multiple sets, costume changes and choreography, and the set list changed from night to night, with two surprise acoustic songs that were different at every show. Fans traded friendship bracelets at the concerts, a practice taken from the lyrics of a song on Midnights, and the tour became a social event as much as a concert, with fans planning outfits for months and travelling across countries to attend.

The tour's commercial scale was unprecedented. It became the highest-grossing concert tour in history, and its success had effects far beyond music: cities that hosted the tour reported large increases in hotel bookings and restaurant spending, economists wrote about the Swift effect on local economies, and the concert film of the tour, released in cinemas in October 2023, became one of the highest-grossing concert films ever made. The tour also changed how concerts are sold. When tickets went on sale in the United States in November 2022, the demand overwhelmed the ticketing company Ticketmaster, and thousands of fans were unable to buy tickets. The failure led to a public debate about ticket pricing and to hearings in the United States Senate, and it put the power of ticketing companies on the political agenda in a way that no previous tour had done.

What the Eras Tour showed, above all, was that a concert could be a cultural event on the scale of a film release or a sporting final. Swift treated the tour as a retrospective of her whole career, and her fans treated it as a shared experience, something to be planned, dressed for and remembered together. The tour's success proved that audiences would pay for a live experience that could not be reproduced on a screen, and it set a new standard for what a stadium tour could be. Other artists have since tried to build tours on the same model, and the industry now talks about eras and chapters in the way Swift taught it to.

5. The Showgirl era: 2025 and 2026

Swift's twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, was released on 3 October 2025, less than a year after the Eras Tour ended, and it continued her collaboration with Max Martin and Shellback, the producers behind her pop albums of the 2010s. The album was a return to bright, theatrical pop after the folk sound of her 2020 records, and it was released with the elaborate visual campaign that has become her signature, including multiple cover variants and a film released alongside it. The album was commercially successful on its release, reaching the top of the charts in many countries, but it also received a more mixed critical response than her previous albums, with some critics praising its confidence and others finding it less substantial than her best work. The debate about the album showed how closely Swift's work is now watched, and how high the expectations for it have become.

In 2026 Swift's life and career reached two further milestones. On 11 June 2026 she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, reported as the youngest woman to receive the honour, a recognition of the songwriting that has been the foundation of her career since she was a teenager. In the same year, her song I Knew It, I Knew You, written for the film Toy Story 5, became a number-one single in the United Kingdom, showing that her commercial power extended beyond her own albums. On 25 September 2026 she released The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, a deluxe edition of the album adding four new songs — Patient Zero, Cleveland, Pink Clouding and Babylon — produced again with Max Martin and Shellback. The lead single, Patient Zero, reached number one in the United Kingdom, and the expanded album returned to the top of the British albums chart.

On 3 July 2026 Swift married Travis Kelce, the American football player for the Kansas City Chiefs, at Madison Square Garden in New York City, less than a year after the couple announced their engagement in August 2025. The wedding, which was attended by family and by friends from music and sport, was one of the most reported celebrity events of the year, and it completed a story that had begun in the summer of 2023, when Kelce attended one of Swift's Eras Tour concerts and spoke about her on his podcast. The marriage also marked a new phase in Swift's public life, in which her personal story is no longer that of a young singer writing about relationships, but that of an established star whose life is followed as closely as her music. In October 2026 she also marked the twentieth anniversary of her debut album, released on 24 October 2006, with the release of archival material from the start of her career.

6. Criticism and debate

Swift's influence has not gone unchallenged, and a fair account of her career must include the criticism. The most persistent criticism concerns the environmental impact of her private jet travel, which has been the subject of reports and of public debate, and which her representatives have responded to by saying that she buys carbon offsets and lends her aircraft to others. Critics have also questioned the number of physical variants of her albums, arguing that releasing many editions of the same record encourages fans to buy multiple copies and produces unnecessary waste. The mixed critical response to The Life of a Showgirl and to its Encore edition in 2026, including a low score on the review-aggregation site Metacritic, showed that her work is judged more strictly than that of most pop stars, precisely because so much is expected of it.

Other criticism has focused on her business practices. Some observers have argued that her re-recording project, while a victory for artists' rights, was only possible because she was already one of the most powerful stars in the world, and that most artists could not do what she did. Others have questioned the dynamic-pricing and ticket-selling arrangements for her tours, and the difficulty many fans had in buying tickets at fair prices. Swift's supporters reply that she has used her power to improve conditions for artists and for fans, and that the problems with ticketing are the fault of the companies that sell the tickets rather than the artist. The debate is a sign of her importance: she is criticised as a business, not only as a singer, because her decisions affect the whole industry.

There is also a debate about the nature of her fame itself. Some critics argue that the intense attention paid to her personal life, including her relationships and her wedding, distracts from the music, and that the fan culture around her can be hostile to critics and to other artists. Others argue that the attention is the point: Swift's career has always been built on the connection between her life and her songs, and her fans' loyalty is the reason she has been able to take the risks she has taken. Both views have evidence behind them, and both are part of the story of how she changed the industry, because the industry she changed is one in which the artist's life and the artist's work are now inseparable.

7. The legacy: what the industry learned from Swift

Swift's legacy in the music industry can be summed up in four changes that are now permanent. First, she proved that a songwriter could be the biggest pop star in the world, and that writing your own songs was not a limitation but a strength. Second, she proved that an artist could fight for ownership of their work and win, and she gave other artists a practical model for doing so. Third, she proved that a concert tour could be a cultural event on the scale of a film release, and that a live show could be the centre of an artist's career rather than a way of promoting a record. Fourth, she proved that an artist could speak directly to her audience, through social media and through the clues and stories she plants in her work, and that the audience would follow.

Those changes are visible in the industry today. Record contracts are written with re-recording in mind. Artists release albums as eras, with a visual identity and a story. Tours are planned as events, with elaborate staging and with tickets that sell out in minutes. Fans expect a direct relationship with the artists they follow, and artists who ignore that expectation struggle to build an audience. None of these changes was caused by Swift alone, and each of them had roots in developments that were already under way, but Swift was the artist who brought them together, who showed that they worked, and who did so at a scale that no one could ignore.

As of 2026, Swift is still in the middle of her career, and her story is not finished. She has released twelve studio albums, won four Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, and built a career that spans country, pop and folk. She has also, in the space of two years, ended the longest tour of her life, released a new album and its deluxe edition, been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and married. What happens next will shape how her legacy is judged, but the changes she has already made to the music industry are not going to be undone. The industry she entered as a teenager in Nashville is not the industry she works in today, and a large part of the difference is her doing.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Taylor Swift
• Wikipedia — Taylor Swift
• Wikipedia — The Life of a Showgirl
• People — Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce wedding
• Music Week — The Life of a Showgirl expanded edition chart double
• Wikipedia — Eras Tour

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• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.