Raymond Roussel
Raymond Roussel was an eccentric genius millionaire, chess enthusiast, and poet.
Athanasius Kircher
A renown polymath, Kircher’s research encompassed a variety of disciplines including geography, astronomy, mathematics, language, medicine, and music, bringing to each a rigorous scientific curiosity girded in a mystical conception of natural laws and forces. His methods ranged from the traditionally scholastic to the boldly experimental. He once had himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius to observe its features soon after an eruption. Another example of his scientific originality is seen in the two chapters of his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae devoted to bioluminescence, where his scientific observations included an experiment to test whether firefly extract could be used to light houses. He also constructed the first known Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that became popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Louis Leakey
Louis Leakey was a Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist whose work was important in demonstrating that humans evolved in Africa, particularly through discoveries made at Olduvai Gorge with his wife, fellow palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey.
Myrtle Corbin
Josephene Myrtle Corbin, the Four-Legged Woman, was born in Lincoln County, Tennessee in 1868. Rather than having a parasitic twin, Myrtle's extra legs resulted from an even rarer form of conjoined twinning known as dipygus, which gave her two complete bodies from the waist down. She had two small pelves side-by-side, and each of her smaller inner legs was paired with one of her outer legs. She could move the smaller legs but was unable to use them for walking. At the age of 19, she married a doctor named Clinton Bicknell and had four daughters and a son. It has been said that three of her children were born from one set of organs, two from the other.
Marchesa Luisa Casati
Marchesa Luisa Casati was an Italian heiress, muse, and patroness of the arts in early 20th-century Europe.
Lord Frederic Hamilton
Lord Frederick was the first person to introduce skiing to Canada. And he wrote The Vanished Pomps Of Yesterday Being Some Random Reminiscences Of A British Diplomat.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans is the author of Against Nature.