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.
Emperor Norton
Emperor Norton was a celebrated citizen of San Francisco, California, who in 1859 proclaimed himself "Emperor of these United States" and subsequently "Protector of Mexico." Though he was considered insane, or at least highly eccentric, the citizens of San Francisco celebrated his regal presence and his proclamations, most famously, his "order" that the United States Congress be dissolved by force (which Congress and the U.S. Army ignored) and his numerous decrees calling for a bridge and a tunnel to be built across San Francisco Bay (which both happened long after his death in the form of the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge and the Transbay Tube).