Curated playlist
American electrical engineers
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman was in seventh grade when he became fixated on BattleBots. The television program featured combat between remote-controlled robots, and it set off what he described as his first experience of self-directed learning. He read…
- Nikola TeslaNikola Tesla was born on the 10th of July 1856 in Smiljan, a village then in the Military Frontier of the Austrian Empire and now in Croatia. His father wanted him to become a priest. Instead, this son of an Eastern Orthodox clergyman…
- Gene CernanGene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface on the 14th of December 1972, climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module, and has not been followed by any human being since. More than half a century later, those footprints in the…
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison kept his own deafness a mystery, inventing elaborate false stories about how he lost his hearing. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other. To enjoy a piano or a music player, he clamped his teeth…
- Eric SchmidtEric Schmidt was born on the 27th of April, 1955, in Falls Church, Virginia, into a family shaped by academia and government service. His father, Wilson Emerson Schmidt, was a professor of international economics who worked at the U.S.…
- Samuel C. PhillipsSamuel C. Phillips was a general who flew fighters over occupied Europe, helped design the missiles that defined the Cold War, and then ran the program that put Americans on the Moon. Not bad for the son of an electrician from…
- Jensen HuangJensen Huang founded Nvidia at age 30 in a Denny's restaurant booth in East San Jose, California, and has led the company every single day since the 5th of April 1993. That diner was not a random choice. Huang had worked the graveyard…
- Ronald Evans (astronaut)Ronald Ellwin Evans Jr. is the last human being to orbit the Moon alone. On the 14th of December 1972, while his crewmates Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt descended to the lunar surface at Taurus-Littrow valley, Evans circled silently…
- Jerome WiesnerJerome Wiesner once blurted out "No, that's no good" in front of the press, directly contradicting Wernher von Braun during a presidential visit to Marshall Space Flight Center. It was a breathtaking moment of public defiance from the man…
- Wat MisakaWat Misaka stood five feet seven inches tall and played point guard, and in 1947 he walked onto an NBA floor before any other non-white player had ever done so. His name is Wataru Misaka, and in the same year Jackie Robinson broke…