People

Évariste Galois

He invented group theory at sixteen. Cauchy lost it. Fourier took it home and died. Poisson called it underdeveloped. Then, in prison, Évariste Galois predicted his own death in a duel over a woman, and nine months later kept the appointment.

Ferdinand Cheval

He spent twenty years on the outer walls alone. The finished palace is twelve meters high and twenty-six meters long. He built it from stones he picked up on his mail route, working by oil lamp after dark, copying temples and shrines from postcards — places he'd never been. When he couldn't be buried in it, he built his own tomb instead. He was seventy-eight when he started. Ferdinand Cheval: the man who tripped on a stone and couldn't stop.

Henri Rousseau

A toll collector painted jungles on weekends. A critic said he worked with his feet, blindfolded. Then Picasso bought one of his portraits for five francs and threw him a banquet. Braque brought a harmonica. The guest of honor was Henri Rousseau.

Honoré de Balzac

He sourced his coffee from three specific streets in Paris, eventually abandoned brewing it, and just ate the grounds dry. He wrote ninety novels in eighteen years, mostly between midnight and eight in the morning, in a white monk's robe. Honoré de Balzac — the man who built an entire world out of words — died at fifty-one calling for a doctor who only existed in his books.

Jeanne Baret

She bound her chest, boarded a French ship as a botanist's valet, hauled rifles across Patagonia, and told the captain Turks had castrated her. He believed her. Then she stepped onto Tahiti. Jeanne Baret: the woman who accidentally circled the world.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

Best swordsman in Europe. Best violinist too. Conducted a Paris orchestra, got Haydn commissioned, could shoot buttons off coats. Then in 1790, while dying of meningitis, he entered a fencing tournament and beat nearly every opponent. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier

A sheep named Climb-to-the-sky, a duck, and a rooster drifted over Versailles for eight minutes. The rooster landed with a broken wing. This was considered reassuring. The brothers behind the experiment were Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier — paper merchants who looked at floating embers and decided humans should do that too.

Julie d'Aubigny (La Maupin)

She burned down a convent, defeated three duels at a single party, and earned two royal pardons before anyone thought to check the law. A composer eventually built an entirely new vocal category around her voice. Her name was Julie d'Aubigny — the woman who rewrote opera with a sword at her hip.

Louis Le Prince

Six foot four. Enormous mutton chops. A suitcase holding the entire prehistory of cinema. He boarded the Dijon-to-Paris express in 1890. The train arrived. He did not. Louis Le Prince: the man who invented being unseen.

Tarrare

The French army once used a man who could swallow live puppies whole as a courier, hiding documents in his stomach.

The Leatherman

For 30 years, a man in 60 pounds of leather walked a 365-mile loop through Connecticut and New York every 34 days. Ten towns changed their laws for him. They opened his grave in 2011 and found only an outline. They called him the Leatherman.

Hennig Brand

He boiled 1,500 gallons of urine looking for gold and accidentally discovered the first new element since antiquity.

Hugo Ball

A man in cardboard lobster claws recited invented words onstage in Zurich, 1916, and accidentally slipped into the cadences of Catholic mass. He had to be carried off. Within four years, Hugo Ball quit Dada entirely. The magic bishop who meant it.

Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Münchhausen

A wanted gem thief published a stranger's dinner-party lies, created a European sensation, then died running a fake copper mine. The stranger sued the wrong person and spent his last years turning visitors away. Baron von Münchhausen: history's most reluctant famous liar.

Yayoi Kusama

She scattered 1,500 mirrored spheres across the Venice Biennale lawn and sold them for two dollars each until officials had her removed. She wrote to Richard Nixon offering to sleep with him if he'd end the Vietnam War. She has lived in a psychiatric hospital since 1977 — and walks across the street to her studio every morning. Meet Yayoi Kusama, the self-appointed High Priestess of Polka Dots.

Beatrix Potter

A Victorian woman painted 350 fungi, germinated spores decades before formal science caught up, and got dismissed by Kew Gardens as delusional. She giggled, went home, and drew a rabbit in a blue jacket. Beatrix Potter: spurned mycologist.

Benjamin Lay

A man lived in a cave, grew his own food, refused sugar, kidnapped a child to prove a point, and stabbed a book full of fake blood in front of a room full of slaveholders. In 1738. Meet Benjamin Lay, the most inconvenient man in American history.

Charles Burgess Fry

He held the world long-jump record, captained England at cricket without losing, played an FA Cup Final, and stood for Parliament three times. Then Albania offered Charles Burgess Fry the throne. The almost-king who had to check with a friend.

Charles Dickens

He slept facing magnetic north, walked twenty miles through London at 2am when that did not cure his insomnia, and kept a raven that bit his children and ate lead paint. Charles Dickens — the man who accidentally handed Edgar Allan Poe his most famous poem.

Charles Waterton

He rode a caiman like a horse. He climbed St. Peter's Basilica to leave a glove on top, then climbed back up to fetch it when the Pope demanded its removal. He dangled his bare foot from a hammock so vampire bats could feed on his toes. Charles Waterton: the barefoot squire who taught the man who taught Darwin.

Daphne Oram

In an oasthouse in Kent, beside cats named Sine and Square and goats named Deci and Bell, a woman built a machine the size of a photocopier, held together by a blue broom handle. You painted a shape on film. It sang. Her name was Daphne Oram.

Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish

She rode through London in a coach pulled by eight white bulls, wore dresses that scandalized Samuel Pepys into near-incoherence, and published critiques of both Hobbes and Descartes. She also wrote science fiction 152 years before *Frankenstein*. Her name was Margaret Cavendish — the woman who kept writing the future while her century tried to close the door.

Edith Sitwell

She lay in a coffin each morning to focus her mind. She dressed in brocade and gold turbans because ordinary clothes, she felt, would make people doubt the existence of the Almighty. An old woman once waited outside her debut performance with an umbrella, intending to beat her. Her jewelry now has its own cases at the V&A. Dame Edith Sitwell: the woman who dressed like a cathedral and quietly saved a dead soldier's poetry from oblivion.

Edward Jenner

He was elected to the Royal Society for figuring out how baby cuckoos roll eggs out of nests. Then he had an idea about cows, a gardener's son, and a lancet. Edward Jenner: violinist, balloonist, planter of roses, inventor of vaccination.

Edward Lear

He painted the Earl's parrots and taught the Queen to draw. When a hotel blocked his sea view, he rebuilt his villa farther up the hill, identical floor plan, so the cat wouldn't feel lost. Edward Lear, nonsense poet, devoted housemate to Foss.

Ethel Smyth

Brahms mentored her. Tchaikovsky thought her promising. Queen Victoria sponsored her Mass. In 1912 she threw a rock through a Cabinet minister's window and was sent to Holloway, where Dame Ethel Smyth conducted the prison yard with a toothbrush.

Gerald Durrell

He stashed a mother scorpion and her babies in a matchbox on the mantelpiece. His brother reached for a cigarette and found the family. A species of kestrel was down to four birds in the wild when Gerald Durrell decided to care about it. There are now around a thousand. The champion of small uglies.

Henry Wellcome

Napoleon's toothbrush. Darwin's walking stick. Shrunken heads. 12,000 packing cases stored between a tannery and an anchovy factory. Sir Henry Wellcome: pharmaceutical king, compulsive acquirer, patron saint of unsorted crates.

J.B.S. Haldane

At thirteen, he was lowered into the sea in a flooding diving suit and revived with whisky. He later drank hydrochloric acid for science, cracked his vertebrae in an oxygen fit, and burst both eardrums. Meet J.B.S. Haldane, gentleman experimentalist.

Jemmy Hirst

He rode a bull to fox hunts and used pigs as pointers. He built a sail-powered carriage that flung him through a shop window. When summoned to meet the king, he wrote back that he was busy training otters to fish. Jemmy Hirst — the man who kept the crown waiting and left with its wine.

John Clare

Eighty miles in four days up the Great North Road, sleeping on clover aimed north, chewing pipe tobacco, then eating it, then eating roadside grass ("something like bread"). The peasant-poet John Clare was walking home to his childhood sweetheart.

John Harrison

At 82, having already solved the longitude problem Newton said was impossible, he wrote a book announcing that all existing music theory was nonsense and the universe should be tuned to pi. Meet John Harrison, choirmaster turned cosmic heretic.

John Hunter

He kept leopards in his London garden and cadavers coming through the back door. He grafted a human tooth onto a rooster's comb to see what would happen. It grew. His motto: "Why think? Why not try the experiment?" John Hunter — the man who turned surgery into a science, killed by a committee meeting.

2 oddlets

John Mytton

He kept 2,000 dogs, some fed on steak and champagne. He rode his pet bear into the drawing room. He cured hiccups by setting himself on fire, then quoted Sophocles in Greek while the burns were still fresh. John Mytton inherited a fortune at two and spent every penny of it — the last, spectacular, ruinous penny. The man his biographer called "a round-shouldered, tottering, old-young man."

Joseph Grimaldi

He shot himself in the foot onstage, sobbed behind the prompter's box between acts, and walked back out for Act Two. By forty-two, doctors called it premature old age. His name was Joseph Grimaldi. He invented the clown.

Joseph Lister

Victorian surgeons wore frock coats stiff with old blood, and spoke fondly of "the good old surgical stink." Then a stammering Quaker asked them to wash their hands. They mocked him for twenty years. His name was Joseph Lister.

Julian of Norwich

In 1373, a woman had her own funeral sung while she was still alive, then walked into a hundred-square-foot stone room and let the door be sealed behind her. She never left. Julian of Norwich — the first woman known to have authored a book in English — wrote from inside a wall.

Lady Hester Stanhope

She ran British politics without a title, got shipwrecked, stole a turban, and was crowned Queen of the Desert. Then she led history's first archaeological dig — found exactly what she sought — and destroyed it. Meet Lady Hester Stanhope, magnificently ungovernable.

Lord Berners

A man dyed his pigeons pastel, kept a giraffe, and once sold two fictional elephants via The Times, leaving Harold Nicolson to spend a day denying he'd bought one. That man was Lord Berners, Britain's most committed eccentric composer.

Lord Byron

Trinity College banned dogs. Byron checked the statutes, found no mention of bears, and installed one. He also kept wolves, monkeys, and a crocodile at home. Meet Lord Byron — the most gloriously ungovernable man in English literature.

Mary Anning

Her neighbors believed she became a genius because lightning killed three women standing next to her when she was fifteen months old.

Mary Kingsley

She clipped a crocodile on the snout with her paddle, salted leeches off her neck like astrakhan, and summited Mount Cameroon in a woollen skirt and sealskin hat. Mary Kingsley, Victorian explorer, would sooner have hanged than worn trousers.

Mary Toft

He certified the rabbit births in cold print. He moved her to a London bath-house. He rushed the pamphlet to press. Four days later, she confessed. Nathaniel St André, surgeon to King George I, lived another fifty years in quiet disgrace.

Paul Dirac

He won a Nobel at 31, predicted antimatter, and held Newton's chair at Cambridge for 37 years. He also spoke so rarely that colleagues coined a unit for it: one word per hour. Paul Dirac, co-founder of quantum mechanics and the quietest man at table.

Percy Fawcett

He survived seven Amazon expeditions. Then he hid his route into the jungle so no rival could reach his lost city first. More than a hundred people died trying to find him. Percy Fawcett: the man the Amazon had to wait for.

Robert Hooke

He coined the word cell, wrote a law every bridge obeys, surveyed four thousand burned plots after the Great Fire, and invented three experiments a week for forty years. Nobody knows what Robert Hooke looked like. The man without a face.

Sidney Reilly

Eleven passports. Seven languages. A 1,049-piece Napoleon collection, including a lock of the Emperor's hair. In 1918 Moscow, British agent Sidney Reilly hatched a plot to topple the Bolsheviks by humiliation. Ian Fleming insisted Bond wasn't him.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

Burton pulled a javelin through his own face and kept fighting, but his wife burned forty years of his writing to save his soul.

Sir Thomas Phillipps

It took 105 wagons to move one man's library and they still left rooms of books behind. The auction to sell it started in 1891 and finished in 2006. Some crates had never been opened. Sir Thomas Phillipps, baronet, bibliomaniac, sofa sleeper.

Wilfred Thesiger

He crossed the Empty Quarter twice by camel. He thought the combustion engine was humanity's worst mistake. In 1956, on the ice of Nuristan, he turned up in a twenty-five-year-old tweed jacket and Persian slippers. Meet Sir Wilfred Thesiger.

William Topaz McGonagall

Pelted with herrings, peas, and soot for twenty-five years. Mistook a palace rejection letter for royal endorsement. Walked sixty miles to Balmoral in full Highland dress through a thunderstorm. Meet William McGonagall, the self-styled Queen's Poet.

Claude Shannon

He juggled while riding a unicycle down Bell Labs hallways at night. A mannequin supervised his player piano. A machine did long division in Roman numerals. Claude Shannon, father of information theory, was only getting warmed up.

D.B. Cooper

He bought a one-way ticket for $18.52, ordered a bourbon, paid his tab, and hijacked the plane. He specified non-sequential twenties, stepped off the back of a moving 727 into a freezing rainstorm, and was never found. D.B. Cooper: the only unsolved skyjacking in American history.

Daniel Hale Williams

A barber, shoemaker's apprentice, and bass player sutured a beating heart by lamplight in 1893. No antibiotics. No precedent. The patient outlived him. His name was Daniel Hale Williams, the doctor who made God share jurisdiction.

Edward Leedskalnin

One man. Around twenty years. 1,100 tons of coral limestone, quarried alone, at night, by hand. A 9-ton gate a child could push open with one finger. A two-story tower with no electricity, no running water, and no explanation for any of it. Edward Leedskalnin — the hundred-pound man who understood, he said, the secrets of the pyramids.

Eunice Newton Foote

She discovered that carbon dioxide traps heat in 1856, and then history erased her name for 154 years.

2 oddlets

Florence Foster Jenkins

She flung roses into the audience one by one, then flung the basket, then flung the castanets. Critics noted she could sing everything except notes. Cole Porter came anyway. Florence Foster Jenkins — the most devoted musician who ever performed in spite of her gifts.

Forrest Fenn

A fighter pilot hid a chest of gold, rubies, and a wax-sealed autobiography no one has read. 350,000 people searched. Five died. The jar sold for $48,000. Forrest Fenn: the man who outlived his own archaeological discovery.

Frances Gabe

A garden hose, a wall smeared with fig jam, and a forty-year engineering vendetta. The runoff washed the dog on its way to the garden. Frances Gabe, inventor of the self-cleaning house, lived to 101. It is now cleaned by hand.

George Eastman

He picked the letter K because it struck him as incisive. He cut his fifty-room mansion in half and rolled the back nine feet four inches on jacks so an organ could fit. He designed a thirteen-month calendar. George Eastman, the tidy man of Kodak.

Harry Partch

He burned every note he wrote before twenty-eight, scavenged Ford hubcaps and bomber nose cones, and built a forty-three-tone scale inside an abandoned chick hatchery. Then Harry Partch hit record as the demolition crew arrived.

Henry Darger

Washed dishes for fifty-three years. Attended Mass five times a day. Told neighbors he was Brazilian so he wouldn't have to bathe. In secret, wrote the longest novel ever written. Meet Henry Darger, America's strangest janitor.

Hetty Green

She heated lunch on a radiator, hunted for two-cent stamps at midnight, and wrote a personal check to keep New York City solvent. Her name was Hetty Green — the richest woman in the Gilded Age.

John Randolph of Roanoke

He arrived at the House floor in riding boots, spurs, and a whip, with hunting dogs at his heels. He described a colleague as shining and stinking "like rotten mackerel by moonlight." He delivered all of it in a voice that never finished puberty. His last words were "Remorse. Remorse." His burial instructions specified a direction. John Randolph of Roanoke: the most terrifying soprano in American political history.

Joseph Cornell

He built shadowboxes for ballerinas, for hotels he'd never slept in, for constellations. A hundred paper dossiers sat in a Queens basement. One was labeled Mouse Material. Meet Joseph Cornell, cartographer of places he never went.

Margaret E. Knight

A twelve-year-old redesigned safety for the New England cotton industry. A man stole her work; she buried him in court with blueprints and witnesses over sixteen days. She held 27 patents, co-founded an all-women car company at 74, and died worth $275.05. Margaret Knight, the ghost of American invention.

Mary Edwards Walker

She wore trousers to her wedding, struck "obey" from the vows, and was once arrested for impersonating a man. Mary Edwards Walker, Civil War surgeon, prisoner of war, and the only woman ever awarded the Medal of Honor, refused to give it back.

Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin)

A blind teenager picked up a drum outside Carnegie Hall and started advising conductors on Brahms. Then he dressed as a Viking, stood on one corner for three decades, and cab drivers used him for navigation. Fortune 500 companies listed him as a landmark. His name was Moondog.

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly spent one night practicing insanity in a mirror, then fooled every doctor who examined her.

Robert Ripley

A man who couldn't swim owned an island. Couldn't drive but kept a fleet of cars. Flew six continents, terrified the whole time. His buckteeth and stammer inspired Elmer Fudd. Robert Ripley: the world's most accomplished coward.

Sarah Winchester

A house with 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, and staircases built two inches tall — not to confuse ghosts, but because her arthritis made normal steps unbearable. The tourist company later admitted inventing most of the famous oddities to sell tickets. Meet Sarah Winchester: the architect who built a house around her own body, and accidentally inspired a theme park ride.

Stubbins Ffirth

He poured infected vomit into his eyes. He fried it in a pan and inhaled the steam. He built a small closet and sat inside it, breathing. Then he drank it — and noted the taste was "very slightly acid." Stubbins Ffirth never got sick, declared victory, and graduated. He was right for entirely the wrong reasons: the man who drank the plague.

Tamanend

Colonists declared him a patron saint. They wore bucktail hats and gave the whoop. Washington threw his feast day at Valley Forge while troops starved. His name ended up on Boss Tweed's desk. Tamanend just offered Penn some acorns.

Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins

Born blind, enslaved, and autistic with a 100-word vocabulary and 7,000 memorized pieces. Played challengers' mistakes back at them — same hesitation, same stumble. Mirrored one woman's body so precisely she fled the theater. Thomas Wiggins, highest-paid pianist in America.

Timothy Dexter

He sent bed warmers to the tropics; his captain sold them as molasses ladles. He dumped a page of loose punctuation at the back of his book and told readers to season it themselves. Oliver Wendell Holmes eventually declared him the true father of American literary independence. His name was Timothy Dexter — the man luck followed like a stray dog that turned out to own the house.