Curated playlist
Fellows of the Royal Society
- Elon MuskIn 2001, Elon Musk traveled to Moscow twice to buy missiles, hoping to launch a plant greenhouse to Mars.
- Carl LinnaeusCarl Linnaeus exposed a mayor's prized seven-headed hydra as a fake. He and his student had to flee Hamburg in a hurry.
- James Beaumont NeilsonJames Beaumont Neilson, a gasworks foreman, cut furnace fuel use to a third with hot air.
- Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of WellingtonWellington's mother called him her "awkward son Arthur." He later defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.
- Alfred, Lord TennysonGrief for a friend who died at twenty-two shaped Tennyson's masterpiece.
- MontesquieuMontesquieu published The Spirit of Law anonymously in 1748, and the Church banned it in 1751.
- Leonhard EulerLeonhard Euler kept producing math after going almost totally blind. In 1775 he wrote about one paper a week.
- Johann BernoulliJohann Bernoulli went to university to study medicine, not mathematics. His father wanted him in the spice trade.
- Adam SmithAdam Smith once walked straight into a tanning pit while talking about free trade.
- Abraham ReesAbraham Rees finished a 45-volume cyclopaedia, then said he was more grateful to have published his sermons.
- John Russell, 1st Earl RussellLord John Russell was barely five feet five, and cartoonists mocked him for it. He still reshaped British democracy.
- Thomas Robert MalthusThomas Malthus argued that population always grows faster than the food supply.
- George SteevensGeorge Steevens edited Shakespeare and also faked a tombstone. He carved an invented Anglo-Saxon inscription for a king.
- Edward Burnett TylorTuberculosis sent a brass factory owner's son abroad in 1855 and changed the course of anthropology.
- Thomas TelfordThomas Telford sealed the iron joints of his Pontcysyllte Aqueduct with boiling sugar and lead.
- Pasquale PaoliPasquale Paoli secretly ordered his own nephew to lose an attack on an island in 1793. Napoleon led two companies in it.
- Joseph WhitworthSir Joseph Whitworth was an English engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, he demonstrated a measuring system precise to one millionth of an inch. That is about 25 nanometres, a distance no…
- C. V. RamanC. V. Raman, the Indian physicist, bought two steamship tickets to Stockholm in July 1930. One was for himself and one was for his wife. The Nobel Prize announcements were not due until November. Raman knew that the voyage to Sweden by sea…
- Stuart J. RussellStuart Russell called the AGI race "a race towards the edge of a cliff." He wrote it in January 2025.
- Srinivasa RamanujanSrinivasa Ramanujan was ill in a hospital at Putney when G. H. Hardy came to visit him. Hardy had ridden there in taxi cab number 1729. He remarked that the number seemed rather dull, and he hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. Ramanujan…