invention
Discoverers who found light in urine and hydrogen in the air.
The Vanishing of the Inventor of Cinema
Three weeks before the demonstration that would have made him the undisputed inventor of cinema, he boarded a train and stopped existing.
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 Woman Who Drew Sound
She quit the BBC Radiophonic Workshop within months of founding it, because the hearing-protection rule was applied only to her.
The Man Who Saw With His Ears
What does geometry sound like when you can only hear it described?
The Birthday Cake
A deaf arithmetic teacher in a Kaluga log cabin derived the rocket equation between marking schoolboys' sums, and kept a trapdoor in his ceiling his family called the door to outer space.
The Clockmaker Who Retuned the Universe
What does an 82-year-old who just solved the longitude problem do for an encore?
The Off-Center Wheel
Why would the man who invented the bit build a unicycle that bobbed up and down on purpose?
The Boy in the Garden
A country doctor famous for birds made two small cuts in his gardener's eight-year-old son — and then did it again, and again, for years.
The Tidy Man
Who lobbies the League of Nations, twice, to adopt a calendar he designed himself?
The Man Without a Face
How do you lose the face of the man who coined the word cell, wrote a law of physics, and rebuilt half of London?
The Wash-and-Be-Clean Man
What did Victorian surgeons do when one quiet Quaker suggested they stop wearing coats stiffened with old blood?
The Woman Who Stole the Car
Why did a woman in 1888 push an automobile down an alley at dawn while her husband slept upstairs?