Curated playlist

1898 births

Ivy PinchbeckHistorian Ivy Pinchbeck argued the Industrial Revolution improved women's lives.
Kenzō MasaokaKenzo Masaoka was the first in Japan to put recorded sound into animation. Before him, film sound was live.
C. S. LewisC. S. Lewis died the same afternoon President Kennedy was shot. His death was almost swallowed by the news from Dallas.
Bertolt BrechtBertolt Brecht left a U.S. congressional hearing in 1947 and flew to Europe the next morning.
George GershwinGeorge Gershwin's last words were "Fred Astaire." He collapsed at age 38 while working on a film score.
Guy Stewart CallendarGuy Stewart Callendar was an English steam engineer who, in 1938, did something no professional climate scientist had managed. He showed that the land surface of the Earth had grown warmer across the previous fifty years. He did it as a…
Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse analyzed Nazi ideology for American spies before students made him a hero.
Zhou EnlaiZhou Enlai ran Communist spies in Shanghai while the secret police hunted him. He never used public transportation.
Warren Sturgis McCullochA reading machine for blind people looked like part of the brain to one researcher. Warren McCulloch built it in 1947.
M. C. EscherM. C. Escher was 70 before the Netherlands held a retrospective of his work.
Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins refused to sign John Maynard Keynes's Depression-era draft. They later reconciled.
Leopold InfeldPhysicist Leopold Infeld left Canada in 1950 after being accused of communist sympathies.
Sergei EisensteinSergei Eisenstein reached Hollywood in May 1930 and was sent home within five months.
Trofim LysenkoTrofim Lysenko, a peasant who learned to read at 13, came to rule Soviet biology. He denied that genes exist.
Georges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was shut out of French academic jobs after his thesis. His teacher told him to go abroad, to Istanbul.
Armand HammerArmand Hammer was buried across the street from the oil company he ran for 33 years. He never practiced medicine.