The curious, forgotten, and extraordinary figures behind every oddlet.

Alexandra David-Néel
She spoke Tibetan, had studied under Himalayan masters, and written books on Buddhist philosophy. None of it got her into Lhasa. So she blackened her face with soot, braided a yak-hair wig, and walked four months through winter mountain passes above 17,000 feet. Meet Alexandra David-Néel, the most ungovernable woman of the twentieth century.

Émilie du Châtelet
She funded her physics research by calculating card game odds and winning.

Erik Satie
He founded a church with himself as the only member. He titled his compositions *Desiccated Embryos* and marked the tempo "with much illness." When he died, his apartment — unseen by anyone for twenty-seven years — contained two stacked pianos, a hundred umbrellas, and years of mail he'd never opened. Erik Satie accidentally named surrealism and never read a single review. The man who changed music wasn't paying attention to any of it.

Ferdinand Cheval

Carl Wilhelm Scheele
A pharmacist working alone in the back rooms of small Swedish towns discovered oxygen, chlorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, and tungsten — then took so long to publish that better-connected chemists in London and Paris announced the same findings first and received all the credit. His method for identifying new substances was to taste them, including hydrogen cyanide and arsenic. He died at forty-three. Meet Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the most productive chemist of the eighteenth century that history mostly forgot to name.
2 oddlets

Queen Christina of Sweden
Queens marry, produce heirs, and stay. This one abdicated at twenty-seven, converted to the religion that was illegal for her to hold, and rode out of Sweden in men's clothing. She also took the imperial art collection. It had already crossed Europe once. Meet Queen Christina of Sweden, the most ungovernable monarch who ever governed.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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."