Harry Houdini was born in Budapest, Hungary, to a Jewish family. Houdini began his career as a trapeze artist and was later renowned as a magician and an escape artist. He astonished audiences by escaping from handcuffs, straitjackets, and prison cells.
Houdini also held a patent for a style of diving suit. The innovation was [...]

Mark Twain’s most lucrative book was actually blank. Twain was a lover of scrapbooks and was often seen carrying one with him. Growing tired of working with harden paste and losing the glue, Twain set out to make a better type of scrapbook. In June of 1873, he received Patent #140245 for improvement in scrapbooks. [...]

Hedy Lamarr was was an Austrian-born American actress and scientist. Through her career as an actress, she was in more than 30 films including her biggest success as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, the highest-grossing film of 1949.
Her contributions to science and technology have had a much more important and lasting impression.
In [...]

Remember the video for “Smooth Criminal?”
Remember that gravity defying lean from the video?
Ever get to see it live and, noticing a lack of wires, wonder how they did it?
Long before CGI, film producers could employ techniques like the use of wires to create unreal effects on screen – props in production that where carefully obscured [...]