George Westinghouse: The Inventor-Industrialist Who Powered the Modern World and Lost to Edison's PR Machine
George Westinghouse championed alternating current, backed Nikola Tesla, won the War of Currents against Edison, and built the electrical infrastructure that powers the modern world. Edison got the fa...
16 Jun 21min
Gottlieb Daimler: The Secret Engine Shed Where the Automobile Was Really Born
Gottlieb Daimler built the first practical gasoline engine in a garden shed so secretive that his neighbors reported him to the police, convinced he was counterfeiting money. He and Wilhelm Maybach wo...
16 Jun 21min
George Orwell: The Eton Rebel Who Lived Among the Poor and Wrote 1984 While Dying
George Orwell was an Eton-educated colonial policeman who quit the British Empire, deliberately lived among tramps and miners to understand poverty from the inside, fought fascism in Spain where he wa...
16 Jun 17min
Bill Gates: From Software Tycoon and Monopolist to the World's Most Embattled Philanthropist
Bill Gates built Microsoft into the most dominant software company in history, survived an antitrust trial that nearly broke it apart, and then reinvented himself as the world's most ambitious philant...
16 Jun 22min
Enzo Ferrari: The Racing Obsessive Whose Cars Killed Drivers and Made Him a Legend
Enzo Ferrari built the most iconic car brand in history not because he loved cars but because he loved racing — and he needed to sell road cars to fund it. He treated his drivers as expendable, feuded...
16 Jun 24min
Cyrus McCormick: The Reaper Baron Whose Invention Myth Was More Fiction Than Fact
Cyrus McCormick is credited with inventing the mechanical reaper that revolutionized American agriculture — but the real story is messier. His father built the first prototype, a slave named Jo Anders...
16 Jun 21min
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: Calculating the Sun's Fate and the Atomic Bomb's Power
The same physics that explains how stars live and die also explained how to build a weapon that could destroy cities. This episode explores the scientists who calculated the inner workings of the sun ...
16 Jun 21min
C.S. Lewis: The Atheist Scholar Who Became Christianity's Most Persuasive Modern Defender
C.S. Lewis was a committed atheist and Oxford medievalist who converted to Christianity and became its most effective popular apologist since G.K. Chesterton. He wrote Mere Christianity, The Screwtape...
16 Jun 22min
