John Keats: The Surgeon-Poet Who Wrote Immortal Verse and Died at Twenty-Five
John Keats trained as a surgeon, abandoned medicine for poetry, produced "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and some of the most beautiful lines in the English language, and died of tuber...
16 Jun 19min
Daniel Defoe: The Secret Spy and Serial Bankrupt Who Wrote Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe went bankrupt multiple times, was pilloried for seditious writing, and worked as a secret agent for the British government — spying on Scottish political movements while pretending to be ...
16 Jun 19min
Lord Kelvin: The Victorian Genius Who Called Radio Useless and Got the Age of the Earth Spectacularly Wrong
Lord Kelvin was one of the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century — he laid the transatlantic cable, established absolute zero, and formulated the second law of thermodynamics. He also declared...
16 Jun 20min
Jonathan Swift: The Ruthless Political Satirist Whose Pen Was More Dangerous Than Any Weapon
Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, and some of the most savage political satire in the English language — all while serving as the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. H...
16 Jun 22min
Soichiro Honda: The Rebellious Mechanic Who Built a Global Empire From a Bicycle Engine
Soichiro Honda had no engineering degree, no business training, and no patience for convention. He strapped a surplus radio generator engine to a bicycle, sold enough motorized bikes to fund a factory...
16 Jun 19min
Matsuo Basho: The Ninja-Trained Wanderer Who Became Japan's Greatest Haiku Master
Matsuo Basho may have been trained as a ninja in the Iga region where he grew up. He abandoned whatever covert skills he possessed to become a wandering poet, walking thousands of miles across Japan a...
16 Jun 21min
Edward Teller: The Dangerous Brilliance of the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb
Edward Teller built the hydrogen bomb, destroyed Oppenheimer's career, and became the model for Dr. Strangelove. A genuine scientific genius whose weapons advocacy made him the most feared physicist i...
16 Jun 24min
Rudolf Diesel: The Engineer Who Invented the Diesel Engine and Vanished From a Ship
Rudolf Diesel invented the engine that bears his name — the most efficient internal combustion engine ever designed — and then disappeared from a cross-Channel steamer in 1913 under circumstances that...
16 Jun 20min
