History’s lovable
weirdos.

History is full of people who did the reasonable thing. They are not on this website.

Oddlet exists for the others. The ones who boiled 1,500 gallons of urine on a hunch. The ones who ate every animal in the kingdom, including mole, just to know what it tasted like. The ones who built palaces out of pebbles, alone, for thirty-three years, because something inside them insisted.

These people were not always rewarded. They were frequently ridiculed. Several of them smelled terrible. But they did the thing anyway — the strange, inexplicable, utterly unnecessary thing — and the rest of us are still living in the world they made.

Every major discovery began as a weird obsession. Every revolution started with someone who looked at the way things were and thought, no. Every field of human knowledge has, somewhere in its foundation, a person whose neighbors genuinely worried about them.

We write about those people. Short pieces, because brevity is its own kind of respect. Warm pieces, because they were lovable weirdos, not trivia questions.

We think the world owes them more than it tends to pay. This is a small installment.