Eccentrics

Julie d’Aubigny

Julie d'Aubigny was a 17th century swordswoman and opera singer. Her tumultuous career and flamboyant life were the subject of gossip and colorful stories in her own time, and inspired romances and novels afterwards. In the following years, d'Aubigny gathered a reputation as a wild woman who hit shopkeepers and fought duels with young aristocrats. She became involved with an assistant fencing master named Serannes. In about 1688, when lieutenant-general of the police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie tried to apprehend Serannes for killing a man in an illegal duel, the pair fled the city to Marseille. In Villeperdue she fought a victorious duel against three squires and drove her blade through the shoulder of one of them. Next day she asked for his health and found out he was Louis-Joseph d'Albert Luynes, son of the Duke of Luynes. Next evening one of his companions came to offer his apologies and she appeared in his room in female clothing. They became lovers.

Philippe Jullian

Philippe Jullian was a dandy, illustrator and writer. One of his first officially noted works was a wine label for Château Mouton Rothschild in 1945.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu

Yoshiro Nakamatsu is a Japanese inventor claiming to hold the world record for number of inventions with over 3,000, including "PyonPyon" spring shoes and the basic technology for the floppy disk, the CD, the DVD, the digital watch, CinemaScope, armchair "Cerebrex", sauce pump, and the taxicab meter.

René Dagron

René Dagron was a French photographer and inventor. During the siege of Paris, Dagron proposed to the authorities to use his microfilming process to carry the messages by carrier pigeons. Dagron photographed pages of newspapers in their entirety which he then converted into miniature photographs. He subsequently removed the collodion film from the glass base and rolled it tightly into a cylindrical shape which he then inserted into miniature tubes that were transported fastened on the wings of pigeons. Upon receipt the microphotograph was reattached to a glass frame and was then projected by magic lantern on the wall. The message contained in the microfilm could then be transcribed or copied. By 28 January 1871, when Paris and the Government of National Defense surrendered, Dagron had delivered 115,000 messages to Paris by carrier pigeon.

William James Sidis

William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities. He first became famous for his precocity, and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from the public eye. He avoided mathematics entirely in later life, writing on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms. With an estimated ratio IQ of 250–300 he is often cited as one of the most intelligent people who ever lived.

Osman Ali Khan

During his days as Nizam, he was reputed to be the richest man in the world, having a fortune estimated at US$2 billion in the early 1940s or 2 percent of the US economy then.

Rube Goldberg

Rube Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons he created depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways - now known as Rube Goldberg machines.

Harry Kessler

W.H. Auden called Harry Kessler the most cosmopolitan man who ever lived. Aesthete, patron, diplomat, diarist, peace campaigner, defender of the Weimar republic and exile from Nazism, this ultra-sophisticated German count belongs to a type that probably no longer exists: a moneyed and cultivated amateur whose brains and background brought him effortless access to politics, society and intellectual life in any capital where he set foot.

Francis Younghusband

Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers.

Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt was a British spy, art historian, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Surveyor of the King's Pictures. Blunt was an acclaimed art historian and the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime