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.
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.