Oddlet · 1 min read
Feb 8, 2026 · Updated Feb 20, 2026
Oddlet · 1 min read
Feb 8, 2026 · Updated Feb 20, 2026
The Man Who Ate Everything
William Buckland was a leading scientist who also made eating animals a research side quest.
William Buckland was, by any reasonable measure, a brilliant scientist. He was the first person to formally describe a dinosaur. He pioneered modern geology. He won the Copley Medal, the highest honor the Royal Society could bestow.
He also wanted to eat every animal on Earth.
Buckland kept a pet hyena named Billy, taught classes by waving skulls at students, and served dinner guests mice on toast, crocodile steak, and roast panther. He declared the common mole the most revolting thing he had ever tasted, until he tried the bluebottle fly. Once, in an Italian cathedral, he licked a dark stain believed to be a martyr's blood and announced it was bat urine.
His most famous moment came at a dinner party in 1848. Lord Harcourt passed around a silver locket containing what guests were told was the mummified heart of King Louis XIV. The room treated it with reverence.
Buckland studied it for a moment, said he had eaten many strange things but never the heart of a king, and swallowed it.
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The Chemist Who Tasted Everything
Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen, chlorine, and more elements than almost anyone in the eighteenth century. Working alone in Swedish pharmacies, he identified each substance by tasting it. Mercury compounds. Arsenic. Hydrogen cyanide, which he found pleasantly sharp. His hands swelled. His joints ached. His body filled with what he'd catalogued. He died at forty-three, notebooks open, descriptions precise. The poisons tasted exactly as he said they would.
The Man Who Boiled His Own Urine and Found Light
Hennig Brand was a 17th-century alchemist who spent both his wives' fortunes chasing gold. In 1669, he collected 1,500 gallons of urine, let it rot, then boiled it down and heated the paste for weeks. What came out wasn't gold — it was a waxy substance that glowed in the dark and burst into flames on its own. He'd discovered phosphorus, the first element ever isolated by a named individual. He went looking for gold in the most preposterous place imaginable and found light instead.
The Woman Who Warmed the World
In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote put carbon dioxide in a glass cylinder, set it in the sun, and discovered it traps heat. She wrote it up. Three years later, a man published similar findings with better equipment and became the father of climate science. Her paper was read aloud by a man because women weren't allowed to present. Then her name vanished from the literature entirely — until 2010, when a geologist found her paper and noticed the experiments had been conducted "by a lady."
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