The Eduard von der Heydt
Eduard von der Heydt was a German and Swiss banker, art collector and patron. He was also the former owner of the Monte Verità, a well-known site of many different uopian and cultural events and communities.
Jay J. Armes
Jay J. Armes is an American amputee, private investigator, and actor. He is known for his prosthetic hands.
Kazuo Ohno
Kazuo Ohno was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in Butoh dance.
Sir William Hamilton
The life of Sir William Hamilton is rich in contradictions: hedonist, scholar and an aesthete with a Rabelaisian streak, he represented the epitome of honourable public service until, as the eighteenth century drew to its climax, his personal life and career were flung into freefall when he became involved in the most scandalous menage a trois of the century. The son of a favourite courtier, William Hamilton began life sharing a wet-nurse with the future George III, and spent much of his childhood in the discordant atmosphere of the Hanoverian household. After several years as a soldier, courtier and MP, he turned to the diplomatic world and, in 1764, was sent to Naples as Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. There Hamilton could indulge the two passions: volcanoes and vases. His meticulous observations of Vesuvius earned him a Fellowship of the Royal Society. His unique collection of vases was eventually acquired by the British Museum. Later in life he also worked with Wedgwood and Boulton. Yet, for most people, William Hamilton is not remembered as a diplomat, art-collector, naturalist, musician and scholar but as the cuckolded husband of Emma Hamilton, mistress of the heroic Lord Nelson.
Collyer brothers
Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Collyer were two American brothers who became famous because of their snobbish nature, filth in their homes, and compulsive hoarding. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.
Lord Lucan
Lord Lucan was a British peer suspected of murder who disappeared in 1974. Once considered for the role of James Bond in the cinematic adaptations of Ian Fleming's novels, Lucan was known for his expensive tastes; he raced powerboats and drove an Aston Martin. On the evening of 7 November 1974, his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, was bludgeoned to death in the basement of the Lucan family home. As the police began their murder investigation, Lucan telephoned his mother, asking her to collect the children, and then drove a borrowed Ford Corsair to a friend's house in Uckfield, East Sussex. Hours later, he left the property and vanished without trace.
Jack Parsons
Jack Parsons was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. An enthusiastic occultist, he was one of the earliest American devotees of Aleister Crowley, and a leading member of his organization, Ordo Templi Orientis. Amongst many other things, Parsons and an associate attempted to bring about some sort of incarnation of the goddess Babalon. Parsons performed rituals (reportedly to the background music of Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff records) for 11 days in a process known as the Babalon Working.
Bryan Berg
Bryan Berg is the world's best card stacker. His most dramatic card building used 1,060 decks of cards. This sculpture of the Dallas skyline set a new world record for the tallest free-standing card stack in 2007.
Sanctorius
For a period of thirty years, Sanctorius weighed himself, everything he ate and drank, as well as his urine and feces. He compared the weight of what he had eaten to that of his waste products, the latter being considerably smaller. He produced his theory of insensible perspiration as an attempt to account for this difference. His findings had little scientific value, but he is still celebrated for his empirical methodology.
E. Virgil Neal
E. Virgil Neal was a cosmetics baron. He had gigs as a hypnotist and personal magnetism guru, and hucksterer of health nostrums in Syracuse, NY, and in the USSR.