Professor Challenger

George Edward Challenger, better known as Professor Challenger, is a fictional character in a series of SF stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Unlike Doyle's better-known character, Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger is a dominating figure.

Like Sherlock Holmes, however, Professor Challenger was based on a real person -- in this case, a professor of physiology named William Rutherford, who had lectured at The University of Edinburgh while Doyle studied medicine there.

Doyle's Professor Challenger stories are The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913), The Land of Mist (1926), The Disintegration Machine (1928), and When the World Screamed (1929).