invention
Discoverers who found light in urine and hydrogen in the air.
The Steersman Goes Home
What does it look like when the man who taught Wall Street to predict the future can't predict where he parked?
No to Edison
What do you do when the man who twice tried to take your patent in court turns around and offers you a job?
Time Me, Gentlemen
He operated with the bloodied blade clamped between his teeth, and the students in the gallery held up their pocket watches to time him.
The Helmet His Wife Made
Who packs a pre-mixed glob of Vaseline and cotton into his pocket before climbing into a balloon, and what exactly does he expect to happen up there?
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.