Switzerland

Famous Swiss People: Swiss Artists, Scientists, Leaders, Musicians, Politicians and Athletes

Switzerland despite being a small country known for its neutrality and the Alps have several distinguished men and women whose contributions not only made their country famous the world over but also brought goodwill to mankind. These famous people have excelled in the arts, in industry, in films and in sports.They are just some of many famous Swiss who have lifted Switzerland’s name worldwide and made a difference in our world. Their purpose and stories inspired awe if not greatness.

:: List of Famous People from Switzerland ::

Ursula Andress
She was the first Bond girl, in the first movie of the James Bond franchise, Dr. No that came out in 1962. She was Honey Ryder, a shell diver in that movie which made her famous. Her entrance, rising from the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini was considered classic and her role in that first Bond film won her a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year. She also starred in a Bond film parody, Casino Royale in 1967 where she played the role of Vesper Lynd. Ursula was born in Ostermundigen on March 19, 1936.

The white bikini she wore in Dr. No was sold at an auction in 2001 for £35,000. She was previously married to John Derek, and had dated James Dean, Jean Paul Belmondo, Marlon Brando and Harry Hamlin with whom she had a son. Ursula made 45 films in 52 years in the business.

Peter Rene Cipiriano Baumann
René Baumann is more popularly known as DJ Bobo, a singer/songwriter as well as a dancer and music producer who was born on January 5, 1968 in Kölliken, Aargau. He has released 10 studio albums and sold 14 million records around the world. Many of his singles made it high in the music charts now only in German-speaking countries but in other parts of Europe as well. René initially wanted to work in the bakery or confectionery industry but the pull of his desire to dance was stronger. Breakdance was popular during the time that he was joining dance competitions and his acrobatic style of dancing earned him many top honors. He was a runner up in the Swiss DJ Championships in 1985 and began to work at several nightclubs in Switzerland. After gaining a lot of experience he decided to come up with his own albums, releasing singles such as I Love You in 1989, Ladies in the House and Let’s Groove On in 1991. His single, Somebody Dance with Me, released in 1992 became a smash hit and started his career breakthrough. He continues to release albums and singles and amass several awards. In October 2006 he became the first Swiss celebrity to be named as a National Ambassador Against Hunger for the UN World Food Programme.

Johann Bernoulli
Johann Bernoulli was born on July 27, 1667 in Basel. He was one of the gifted mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. His father wanted him to have a degree in business to manage their spice business after his father but he wanted to study medicine. However, medicine did not actually interest him and he begun to study mathematics on the side together with Jacob, his older brother. He and his brother were the first to study infinitesimal calculus and the application of calculus to various mathematical problems. He taught mathematics at the Basel University, taking over the position his brother vacated when Jacob died of tuberculosis. One of his students who later rose to prominence as a mathematician and physicist was Leonhard Euler.

Daniel Bernoulli
Daniel Bernoulli, born on February 8, 1700 was the son of Johann Bernoulli. Daniel’s work is still lengthily studied in many science schools across the globe. He was famous for mechanical applications of mathematics, particularly fluid mechanics as well as for his work on statistics and probability. He made great inroads into the study of mathematics that even his father got jealous of his successes and even plagiarized Daniel’s work on his book on hydrodynamics. Johann came up with an antedated book on hydraulics just so he can surpass his son.

Ernesto Bertarelli
Ernesto Bertarelli and his family was ranked as the 81st richest people in the world in the 2001 ranking by Forbes magazine, with an estimated wealth of 10 billion US dollars. Bertarelli was born on September 22, 1965 in Rome before his family moved to Switzerland in 1977. His father was the founder of Serono, a pharmaceutical company. After his father’s death he and his sister changed the focus of their company to biotechnology, which increased their revenues and it became world-famous for its discovery of a natural hormone treatment for infertility in women. They sold the company to Germany’s Merck KGaA and formed the Merck-Serono Company.

They later diversified into investments ventures and asset management business, setting up Kedge Capital and Northill Capital and Ares Life Sciences to pour investments on biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and medical technology. Their investment companies have interests in Euromedic, which specializes in clinical laboratory, cancer treatment, renal care and diagnostic imaging. They are also key investors in Esaote that specializes in diagnostic imaging such as MRI and ultrasound and in Stallergenes, a biopharmaceutical company that specializes in allergen immunotherapy.

Bertarelli founded Team Alighi, a yachting syndicate in 2000. Early successes came when they won the Louis Vuitton Cup in 2003 representing the Societe Nautique de Geneve or the Nautical Society of Geneva and beat the New Zealand team in Auckland to claim the America’s Cup.

Denise Biellmann
Denise Biellmann, a world-renown and multi-awarded figure skater was born in Zurich on December 11, 1962. She started winning medals representing Switzerland at age 8. She was 14 when she won silver in Free Skating during the European Championships where she was able to execute the triple Lutz and the accompanying spin that became her trademark and which was named after her. The Biellmann Spin is now part of the judging criteria in the International Skating Union Judging System. Denise won an Olympic Gold Medal in Free Skating in 1980. As a professional skater, Biellmann was also known for skating to live music performances of famous musical artists such as Vanessa Mae, En-Vogue, Chris de Burgh, Barry Manilow, Gloria Gaynor, Scorpions, Sarah Brightman and Udo Jürgens.

Mario Botta
Mario Botta, born on April 1, 1943 is a well-known architect, whose designs are usually stark, strong, tall and geometric in shape but creates lots of space. A lot of his architectural works can be seen around Ticino. Other examples of his work are the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in the United States, the Mediatheque located in Villeurbanne, Europa Park Dome and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Shibuya-ku, Japan.

Jean Henri Dunant
Henri Dunant was born on May 8, 1828. He was a social activist as well as a businessman. He wrote a book entitled “A Memory of Solferino,” a personal memoir of what he witnessed and experienced while on a business trip in Solferino, a small town in Mantua, Lombardy where Dunant witnessed what happened to the 38,000 soldiers who died or left dying or wounded on the battlefield during the Battle of Solferino on June 24, 1859. It was part of the Second Italian War of Independence, where they were fighting the Austrians. He took it upon himself to organize the civilians and those who were able to help the wounded and the dying, erecting a makeshift hospital and buying the necessary supplies to tend to the soldiers. Dunant was instrumental in the establishment in 1863 of the International Committee of the Red Cross and in 1864 of the creation of the Geneva Convention. Dunant was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 together with Frederic Passy.

Alfred Escher
Politician and railway entrepreneur Alfred Escher was born in Zurich on February 20, 1819. He supported the idea of building and operating a privately owned railway system in Switzerland. In 1856, he founded what is now called Credit Suisse, together with other investors. It was originally called Schweizerische Kreditanstalt.

Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler, born on April 15, 1707, was one of the prominent students of Johann Bernoulli. He became a physicist and a mathematician whose works are still being utilized today. His forays into the science of mathematics were legendary and he made several important discoveries on graph theory and infinitesimal calculus, modern mathematical notation and terminology and mathematical analysis. For the latter, he was renowned for his contributions in fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy and mechanics.

Roger Federer
Considered to be one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Roger Federer was born on August 8, 1981. He broke and made several records in professional tennis. He held the number one spot in the Association of Tennis Professionals for 237 straight weeks. He is as to date ranked third (July 18, 2011) in the ATP ladder. He has 16 Grand Slam singles titles and 5 ATP World Tour titles tying his record with Pete Sampras and Ivan Lendl. He has 17 ATP Masters Series titles, equaling the record of Andre Agassi and an Olympic Gold Medal in doubles (2008 Summer Olympics) with Stanislas Wawrinka, another Swiss professional tennis player. He broke the 64 ATP tour singles title record set by Pete Sampras by winning 67 career titles. Federer married his long-time girlfriend, Mirka Warwinka, a retired WTA player from Slovakia whom Federer met in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.The couple has twin daughters, born on July 23, 2009.

Hans Rudolf Giger
He is more known by his nickname Ruedi. Giger, born on February 5, 1940 is a surrealist painter. He is also a set designer and a sculptor. Most of his previous paintings were usually done with an airbrush, characterized by nightmarish and surrealistic dreamscapes in monochrome. Giger suffers from night terror and his experiences with his sleep disorder were usually depicted in his artworks. He also created biomechanical representations of humans and machines, evidenced by his Academy Award for Best Achievement for Visual Effects, an award he won for his visual design work on Alien, a science fiction horror film released in 1979 and starred Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt. Giger’s art influences were Salvador Dali and Ernst Fuchs.

Martina Hingis
Martina Hingis, a retired women’s professional tennis player was born on September 30, 1980 in Slovakia. Dubbed the “Swiss Miss,” Martina was the youngest tennis player ever to win a Grand Slam match. Martina’s parents were both accomplished tennis players and her mother was determined to rear her to be a tennis star while when she learned that she was pregnant. They were both of Czech descent. Martina’s parents divorced when she was six years old and she and her mother relocated to Switzerland. She took up the tennis racket when she was only two years old and was already competing in a tennis tournament by age four. She claimed the French Open junior girls’ singles title in 1993 when she was 12 and won the junior girls’ singles title at Wimbledon the following year. At age 14 she was already a professional tennis player. Martina won the Australian Open three times, and the US Open and the Wimbledon once. She was a finalist in the French Open twice. She was also an accomplished doubles player and had won 38 titles, including winning in all the Grand Slam events several times. Martina retired from professional tennis on November 1, 2007. She married show jumper Thibault Hutin, 6 six years her junior in an intimate ceremony in Paris on December 10, 2010.

Claude Nicollier
Claude Nicollier, born on September 2, 1944 is the first Swiss astronaut. He hailed from Vevey, Switzerland. His first spaceflight was in 1992 and since then had three other spaceflights aboard the Space Shuttle and was part of the team that serviced the Hubble space telescope twice. His final flight was in 1999 where he also participated in a Space Shuttle mission spacewalk, a first achievement for a member of the European Space Agency. He was assigned to the branch of the Astronaut Office Extravehicular Activity in 2000 while also performing as lead European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut in Houston, Texas until his retirement in 2007.

Simone Niggli-Luder
Simone Niggli-Luder has set many records in the sport of orienteering. Born in Burgdorf, Bern on January 9, 1978, she has won the all four of the women’s events at the world championships in 2003 and 2005. She started competing in the sport when she was only 10 years old. Her list of achievements is truly impressive. Simone has 1 gold, 1 silver and 2 bronze medals in the Junior World Championships. At the Nordic Championships she had a total medal haul of 2 golds, 5 silvers and 1 bronze. She won 7 gold, 4 silver and 1 bronze medals in the European Championships. Her greatest accomplishments were in the World Championships where she has won a total of 17 gold, 2 silver and 5 bronze medals, including her winning in all four women’s competitions in Rapperswil, Switzerland in 2003 and in Aichi, Japan in 2005. She also has won gold medals at the World Games and the World Cup. She is married to Matthias Niggli, also an orienteering athlete from Switzerland.

Auguste Antoine Piccard
Born on January 28, 1884 in Basel, Auguste Piccard was an inventor, a physicist as well as an explorer. At an early age he showed great interest in science. He became a professor of physics at the Free University of Brussels. He became interested in ballooning and created a round, pressurized gondola made from aluminum. In it a person can ascend to a higher altitude without needing to don a pressure suit. With funding from the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique he was able to construct the gondola and together with Paul Kipfer ascended to the upper atmosphere from Augsburg, Germany on May 27, 1931. They reached a record height of 15,785 meters, gathering upper atmospheric data and cosmic ray measurements. He repeated the ascent on August 18, 1932, launching from Dübendorf, Switzerland with Max Cosyns and reached 16,200 meters. After 27 balloon flights, he was able to reach 23,000 meters. From his balloon design he began its application for a similar device that will make it possible to go deep down into the ocean in a capsule that will maintain normal air pressure. He was able to finish his design after World War II. The cockpit that he designed, called FNRS-2 made a series of unmanned dives in 1948 and was donated to the French Navy in 1950 where it was redesigned and four years later was able to take a man safely down into the ocean at a depth of 4,176 meters.

Jacques Piccard
Jacques Piccard was the son of Auguste Piccard. He was born in Brussels on July 28, 1922 where his father taught physics at the Free University of Brussels. He too, was interested in the sciences and became an engineer and oceanographer. His most notable contribution was the development of underwater vehicles that allow scientists to study ocean currents at great depths. He helped his father improve the submersible that his father started developing, called the bathyscaphe. They were able to build three of these submersible from 1948 to 1955 and were able to reach record depths of 4,600 feet and 10,000 feet. From teaching economics at the University of Geneva, Jacques eventually concentrated on the development of the submersible. He became one of only two people to have descended to the deepest part of the ocean, reaching the deepest location of the Earth’s crust surface at the Challenger Deep located in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Aboard the Bathyscaphe Trieste, Jacques and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh made the five-hour descent on January 23, 1960 and reached a depth they measured to be 10,916 meters. They only spent some twenty minutes on the ocean floor due a crack on the glass due to pressure and because there was almost zero visibility because they stirred silt during their landing. Their ascent took three hours and fifteen minutes. Further explorations of the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep are now unmanned.

Bertrand Piccard
Continuing the Piccard family’s tradition of exploration, Bertrand, the son of Jacques Piccard, born on March 1, 1958 is also a balloonist and a psychiatrist. He was born in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. He rose to fame, together with Brian Jones of England when they completed the first non-stop balloon flight around the globe on March 1, 1999 aboard the Breitling Orbiter 3. They took off from Chateau d’Oex in Switzerland, circumnavigated the globe and landed in Egypt after 19 days, 21 hours and 47 minutes, a flight that was 45,755 kilometers long. Their remarkable feat was duly recognized and they received the Charles Green Salver, the FAI Gold Air Medal and the Harmon Trophy.

Peter Sauber
Peter Sauber was born on October 13, 1943 in Zurich. He built his first Sauber C1 car in the basement of his parent’s house. The “C” stands for Christine, the name of Peter’s wife. The tubular framed car with a Ford Cosworth engine featured in the Swiss hillclimb championships in 1970, with Peter driving the car himself. This first racing car was used for 10 years, handled other racing drivers. Friedrich Hürzeler won the racing crown in 1974 with the Sauber C1. He went on to build racing cars for other clients while building his own Sauber C cars up to model C5. In 1979 he focused his attention to building Lola F2 car chassis. In 1980 and 1981 he started building BMW M1 sportcars and won the 1000-kilometer Nürburgring race in 1981. The following year he received sponsorship funding from BASF and created the C6 car and marked his return to sports car racing, with the Sauber C6 being their first car to be tested in a windtunnel. His partnership with BMW led to Sauber to focus his attention on Formula One and launched the career of Michael Schumacher and Karl Wendinger, Sauber’s own protégé.

Johanna Lousie Heusser Spyri
Johanna Spyri was best known as the author of Heidi, a very popular children’s book. She was born on June 12, 1827 in Hirzel, a rural area in Switzerland. Many settings of her novels were around Chur, where she spent many summers during her childhood. Johanna wrote Heidi in four weeks. It is a story revolving around Heidi, an orphan girl who lived with her grandfather in the Alps. The story was made more significant by Johanna’s vivid description of the Swiss Alps landscape and of Heidi becoming their personification.

Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely, born in Fribourg on May 22, 1925 was a sculptor and painter, best known for his kinetic art in the Dada tradition. The art is officially named metamechanics, and his works were often satires of what he deemed were the “mindless overproduction of material goods” which became very common in industrialized societies. He created the Homage to New York in 1960. It was a self-destructing sculpture but it only partially self-destructed while on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Another work of Tinguely entitled Study for an End of the World No. 2 which he created in 1962 successfully detonated in the Las Vegas desert in from of an audience.

Nicholas Von Der Flue
He was born on March 21, 1417 in the canton of Unterwalden. He was a soldier who was known to fight with a rosary in his hand while holding a sword on the other. His parents were wealthy peasants and at age 30 he married Dorothy Wiss, a farmer’s daughter who bore him 10 children. He continued his military service until he was 37 with the rank of captain and became a councilor and judge for his canton.

He reportedly had a mystical vision of a white lily eaten by a horse which he interpreted as his worldly life represented by the horse taking over his spiritual life, represented by the lily. With the consent of his wife, he left his family and set up to become a hermit in the Ranft chine, establishing a chantry with his own money and survived for 19 years on the Eucharist, according to legend. His reputation for piety and wisdom became known across Europe and he was sought after for advice by European personalities who called him Brother Klaus. Pope Paul II granted the first indulgence to the Ranft sanctuary in 1470. It became a pilgrimage site and Brother Klaus became honored by Catholics and Protestants.

Saint Nicholas of Flüe was beatified in 1669 and canonized in 1947 by Pope Pius XII. He became the patron saint of Switzerland and his feast day is celebrated on March 21, following the Roman Catholic Church calendar. In Switzerland and Germany his feast day is celebrated on September 25.

Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Jung was born in July 26, 1875. He was a psychiatrist and known as the founder of analytical psychology. He was also the best-known pioneers of dream analysis and also delved into Western and Eastern philosophies, astrology, alchemy and sociology, which he used for his studies on the symbols and processes of the human psyche that come out in dreams and other unconscious states. He considered the process of individuation, the central concept in analytical psychology as a necessary process in order for a person to become whole – integrating the conscious with the unconscious while maintaining each state’s autonomy. Many of his pioneering theories on psychological concepts led tot eh development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a psychometric instrument.

Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was born on October 10, 1901 in the canton of Graubünden. He is a renowned painter, printmaker, draftsman and sculptor. He became very popular for his surrealist sculptures, featuring figures that are almost reed thin and elongated due to overworking, due mainly to his obsession on how he views reality. In one of his artistic phases, his creations grew larger, except that as the larger the artwork grew, the thinner they become.

Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879 in Münchenbuchsee. He had an individual style that is quite hard to distinguish, as his works were a combination of cubism, surrealism and expressionism. He painted in isolation most of the time and usually had his own way of interpreting new trends in art. He was quite inventive and used often combined different media, using ink, water color, pastel and oil paint with etching on burlap, muslin, canvas, linen, gauze, metal foils, newsprint and cardboard. He also created art works using stamping, glazing, impasto techniques as well as spray paint and applying colors with a knife. Zentrum Paul Klee, built by Italian architect Renzo Piano was erected in Bern and opened in 2005. The museum showcases more than 4,000 works of Paul Klee.

Carl Franz Bally
Born in October 24, 1821, Carl Franz Bally founded the Bally Shoe Company when he was 30 years old. His grandfather was an Austrian immigrant who worked as a mason at a ribbon factory in the canton of Solothurn. Later his grandfather was able to start his own ribbon manufacturing company where Carl worked at when he was 17, handling new products. He was on a business trip to Paris where he visited a shoe manufacturing company, which spurred his idea to start one of his own, which he did in 1851. He established sales organizations in Uruguay, Paris and Argentina. In less than 30 years, Carl was able to transform the village of Schönenwerd where his shoe factory was located into an industrial center.

He established schools, old-age homes and parks and even built homes for his workers. He filled the gaps for additional workers by opening several smaller factories nearer to the workforce.

Francois-Louis Cailler
Francois Cailler born in 1796 was the first producer of Swiss chocolate. His first taste of Italian chocolate was during a local fair. His fascination with the delicacy led him to learn the art of making chocolates in Turin, Italy for four years. When he got back to Switzerland he established his first factory near Vevey in 1819, and opened a second factory six years later. His chocolate became a Swiss trademark, smooth chocolate that can be formed into bars.

Daniel Peter
Daniel Peter, born in 1836 was a son-in-law of Francois Cailler. He was credited for being the first person to make a milk chocolate bar. He had that idea of combining chocolate with condensed milk, produced by his neighbor, Henri Nestle. He enlisted the help of Henri, a baby food manufacturer to help remover the water from the mil, thus inventing a new process. Peter and his father-in-law’s company, Cailler’s merged with Charles-Amedee Kohler, the inventor or hazelnut chocolate to form the Peter, Cailler, Kohler Company. In 1879, Peter and Henri Nestle formed the Nestle Company. The firm Peter, Cailler, Kohler was acquired by Nestle in 1929.

Georges Edouard Piaget
In 1874, Georges Edouard Piaget was 17 years old when he set up his first workshop in Jura, in the village of La Côte-aux-Fées. It was initially founded to manufacture watch movements. They were also known to manufacture high quality pocket watches as well clock movements of very high precision for established and well-known brands. And their fame spread beyond the Neuchâtel. Soon they were designing their own watches and became very popular for their designs of luxury watches and jewelry.

Philippe Suchard
Philippe Suchard, a Swiss chocolatier was born on October 9, 1797. He was born in the village of Boudry. He was already dreaming of having a chocolate =manufacturing company when he was 12 years old. He apprenticed in his brother’s Konditorei when he was 18 and went to the United States in 1824 specifically to learn the process of chocolate making. After his less than a year visit to the United States he opened a confectioner’s shop in Neuchâtel. His business grew and by 1826 he was able to open the Chocolat Suchard, with only two people. He employed the use of hydropower to run his mills while be used a grinding mill with a heated granite plate and several granite rollers moving to and fro, a design that is still in use today for grinding cocoa into paste. His business took a turn for the better in 1842 when he received a bulk order from the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV. King Frederick was also the prince of Neuchâtel at that time. Others followed and Suchard’s chocolates became a boom and gained wide recognition as they joined several exhibitions and expositions. Suchard became the first to open a branch abroad, establishing a factory in Lörrach, Germany in 1880. Suchard became the largest chocolate producer by the end of the 19th century and the world-famous Milka chocolate was produced 17 years after his death on January 14, 1884.