Curated playlist
1904 births
- Dr. SeussAn education publisher dared Dr. Seuss to write a book children can't put down. The result was The Cat in the Hat.
- John GielgudJohn Gielgud was arrested months after being knighted. Backstage in Liverpool, he feared he could not face an audience.
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer gripped a post to steady himself as the first nuclear bomb went off.
- Alexei KosyginHenry Kissinger once mistook Alexei Kosygin for the real leader of the Soviet Union.
- Salvador DalíSalvador Dalí was born nine months after his older brother, also named Salvador, died.
- Joseph CampbellGeorge Lucas said Joseph Campbell's book helped shape Star Wars. They met only in 1984.
- Hans Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein's son Hans Albert became a river engineer, not a physicist. He studied how rivers carry sediment.
- Reinhard HeydrichReinhard Heydrich was riding through the Prague suburb of Libeň on the 27th of May 1942. He was heading for the airport and a planned meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. At a hairpin bend the car had to slow down. Jozef Gabčík stood ready…
- John HicksEconomist John Hicks called his own famous diagram a classroom gadget. He made the IS-LM model in 1937.
- George GamowGeorge Gamow added Hans Bethe's name to a physics paper as a prank. Bethe had not written a word of it.
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner proposed steering missiles with pigeons. The birds pecked at a screen showing the target.
- George F. KennanGeorge Kennan spent decades disowning the Cold War policy he made famous. Containment, he said, was not military.