A cabinet of lovable weirdos
Weird science, forgotten history, and human quirks — each one true, each under a minute, each a little stranger than you’d expect.
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Harry Partch
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
He burned every note he wrote before twenty-eight, scavenged Ford hubcaps and bomber nose cones, and built a forty-three-tone scale inside an abandoned chick hatchery. Then Harry Partch hit record as the demolition crew arrived.
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What does it take for an 18th-century woman, raised in a kitchen, to become the first person ever paid by the British Crown for science?

A terrified little man taught crafts to bored teenagers in Drohobycz and wrote two of the strangest books of the twentieth century, until the SS officer next door decided he wanted a Jew of his own.

He won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from separate cells. He found out by drawing them, on an ink-stained tablecloth, for fifty years.

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.