debt
People who owed more than they owned, and kept going.
The Rubber Man
The man who invented vulcanized rubber spent $30,000 he didn't have to build a palace of rubber furniture inside a building made of glass.
The Man Who Set Himself on Fire to Cure Hiccups
He inherited 132,000 acres at age two and died in a debtors' prison at thirty-seven, and those are not the strange parts.