People

Queen Nzinga

She arrived at a peace negotiation and found a mat on the floor where her chair should have been. She sat on an attendant's back instead, conducted the meeting at eye level, and remarked afterward that she didn't use the same chair twice. Then she went home and raised an army. Queen Nzinga — the woman Portugal spent thirty years failing to defeat.

Hedy Lamarr

The Navy told Hedy Lamarr she'd be more useful selling kisses than inventing torpedo guidance systems.

Tycho Brahe

The greatest astronomer of the sixteenth century lost his nose in a duel over math, consulted a clairvoyant dwarf, and owned a moose that died falling down stairs drunk on beer.

Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt

He took the fortress that defeated Napoleon. He destroyed two Ottoman armies. Four European powers formed an emergency coalition specifically to stop him from finishing the job. Ibrahim Pasha spent his life winning wars for his father — and held power for 113 days before his lungs gave out. The soldier who never lost a battle.

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

Hennig Brand

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

Diogenes of Sinope

Plato defined a human being as a featherless biped. His students found this clean, logical, elegant. Then someone plucked a chicken and walked into the lecture. The chicken won. Meet Diogenes of Sinope, the most committed philosopher who ever lived in a jar.

Ignaz Semmelweis

He died of the same infection, in the same place on his body, that he'd spent his life trying to prevent.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

In 1895, a scientist invented radio components he refused to patent, then built a machine that recorded the exact moment a plant died.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

A goddess wrote equations on his tongue in dreams, and when mathematicians finally checked his work, he was right.

Hokusai

He once dipped a chicken's feet in red paint, chased it across a blue wash, and presented the result to the shōgun as a landscape of the Tatsuta River with autumn leaves. He moved house ninety-three times. He changed his name thirty. The blue that defines his most famous image — the one now considered the most quintessentially Japanese artwork ever made — was smuggled contraband, invented in Berlin, reverse-engineered in Guangzhou. Katsushika Hokusai died at eighty-eight. His tombstone read: Old Man Mad About Painting.

Ibn Battuta

A 21-year-old scholar left home for a 16-month trip. He didn't return for 24 years. On his trip he crossed the Sahara, served as a Judge, was shipwricked and visited China. Meet Ibn Battuta, the most restless man who ever lived.

José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia

He uprooted every tree along his riding routes so no assassin could hide behind one. He abolished every university in the country and offered his personal bookshelf as a substitute. He arrested a botanist for planting tea. When the most famous scientist on earth wrote to demand the man's release, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia — the man who sealed Paraguay shut like a jar — simply didn't answer.

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla loved a pigeon as a man loves a woman. When she died, he said his life's work was finished.

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.

Henry Cavendish

He measured the density of the entire Earth. When he saw his housekeeper on the stairs, he built a second staircase.

Oliver Heaviside

The four equations that power every phone on Earth were written by a man who lived on granite blocks and signed his letters W.O.R.M.

Buckminster Fuller

After nearly walking into Lake Michigan in 1927, Buckminster Fuller decided instead to document his entire life in fifteen-minute intervals.

Joshua Norton

Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor, and San Francisco largely agreed.

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.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

She discovered what stars are made of, then a famous man told her to cross it out and wrote it back in his own handwriting.

William Buckland

William Buckland was a leading scientist who also made eating animals a research side quest.