Creators who gave us wireless technology, recorded sound, detected plant distress, and discovered phosphorus in urine. Innovation springs from the strangest experiments and most obsessive minds.
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.
In 1942, Hedy Lamarr was Hollywood's most beautiful woman. She was also an inventor. With composer George Antheil, she patented a frequency-hopping system to guide torpedoes without jamming. The Navy sent her to sell war bonds instead. The patent sat in a drawer for twenty years, expired worthless, then became the foundation of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. She earned nothing. At eighty-two, receiving a belated award, she said: "It was about time."
Jagadish Chandra Bose invented fundamental radio technology a year before Marconi — the waveguide, the horn antenna, the semiconductor detector — and refused to patent any of it. Knowledge, he said, belonged to everyone. Then he built the crescograph, which magnified plant movement ten million times. With it, he watched plants respond to light and touch, fall asleep under chloroform, and wake up again. Then he poisoned one. The crescograph recorded a violent electrical spasm, then a flat line. An audience watched a plant die the way they might watch an animal die: with a shudder, and then with nothing.
Buckminster Fuller was expelled from Harvard twice, went bankrupt, and in 1927 stood at the edge of Lake Michigan contemplating the end. Instead, he turned his life into an experiment: what could one broke, discredited person accomplish if he devoted everything to benefiting humanity? He began recording his life in fifteen-minute intervals — every letter, bill, sketch, scrap of thought. He kept it up until his death in 1983. The archive at Stanford measures 270 linear feet. They call it the most documented human life in history.
Tesla invented AC power and held 300 patents. He also required exactly 18 napkins per meal, walked around blocks three times, and loved a white pigeon. When she died, he knew he was done. He was right.