The Farm Boy Who Invented Television
On July 3rd, 1957, a man introduced only as "Dr. X" stumped the celebrity panel of the CBS quiz show I've Got a Secret. His secret: "I invented electronic television." For giving the world the medium ...
10 Jun 28min
The False Face of Vitus Bering
His name covers the map: the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, a glacier, an island. But when forensic scientists exhumed his grave in 1991, the bones didn't match the famous portrait. The round face his...
10 Jun 19min
The Empty Safe of Thérèse Humbert
Paris, 1902. A court orders a legendary, heavily guarded safe cracked open, the safe that supposedly held millions in bearer bonds and had anchored two decades of borrowed fortunes. Inside: old newspa...
10 Jun 20min
The Dropout Who Invented the Microwave
The humming box in your kitchen owes its existence to a double orphan from rural Maine who left school at twelve to work in a spool mill. Percy Spencer taught himself electrical engineering to wire a ...
10 Jun 18min
The Deaf Teacher Who Invented Spaceflight
In a drafty log house on the muddy outskirts of a Russian provincial town, a deaf, self-taught math teacher the locals dismissed as the town crank, famous for sailing his bicycle down dirt roads under...
10 Jun 46min
The Curse of the Brink s-Mat Gold
On a chilly Saturday morning in November 1983, six armed men broke into a Heathrow warehouse expecting one million pounds in Spanish pesetas. Instead they found 6,800 bars of pure gold, three tons of ...
10 Jun 18min
The Cult Leader Behind the Theorem
Think of Pythagoras and you picture the equation and a dusty chalkboard. But modern scholars believe the man himself probably never did significant mathematics in his life and almost certainly didn't ...
10 Jun 21min
The Clerk Who Shocked Cambridge Mathematics
In 1913, one of the world's leading mathematicians opened a nine-page letter from an unknown accounting clerk in Madras and initially suspected fraud, because the formulas inside seemed impossible. Th...
10 Jun 19min
