INVENTORS
- The scientist Louis Pasteur used to sneak a microscope into friends' houses under his coat and then examine the food they were serving to make sure it was safe from germs.
- Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four years old.
- Albert Einstein called his brain his laboratory. In science's continuing search for clues to genius, Einstein's brain was picked apart, gram by gram, and analyzed in a laboratory in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Thomas Harvey, former chief pathologist, Princeton University, was conducting the study.
- Alfred Nobel made his fortune as an inventor and manufacturer of high explosives and
detonators.
- As a boy in Switzerland, Alexander Graham Bell made a talking doll that said, "Mama."
- Roulette was invented by the great French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It was a by-product of his experiments with perpetual motion.
- George Washington Carver developed over 300 products from the peanut, including soap, ink, candy, synthetic rubber, shaving cream and paper.
- George Washington Carver, whose research on such common crops as the peanut led the South away from its perilous one-crop economy (cotton), was illiterate until the age of 20.
- Henry Ford was obsessed with soybeans. He once wore a suit and tie made from soy-based material, served a 16-course meal made entirely from soybeans, and ordered many Ford auto parts to be made from soy-derived plastic.
- Isaac Newton's only recorded utterance while he was a member of Parliament was a request to open a window.
Sources: A Book of Days for the Literary Year, ed. Neal T. Jones: The Emperor who Ate the Bible: and more Strange Facts and Useless Information, by Scot Morris: Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts, by Isaac Asimov; www.publishingcentral.com.
|
