James Watt

 EARLY LIFE 

James Watt was born on January 19, 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland.

James Watt by John Partridge, after Sir William Beechey (1806)

James was the eldest of the five surviving children of James Watt (1698–1782) and Agnes Muirhead (1703–1755).

James Watt Snr was a merchant and ballie who ran a successful ship and house building business.

Young James was a delicate child, who was bullied by his classmates.

It is said James originally got the idea for a steam engine while still a boy watching steam lift the lid off his mother’s tea kettle.

James was educated at home by his mother, later going on to attend Greenock Grammar School.

Labelled dull and inept by his teachers James only began to develop intellectually when he got into geometry at the age of 13.

EARLY CAREER 

After leaving school Watt worked in the workshops of his father's businesses. After his father lost his inheritance due to commercial disasters Watt left Greenock to seek employment in Glasgow as a mathematical instrument maker.

When he was 18 Watt's mother died and his father's health began to fail. He travelled to London and was apprenticed to John Morgan as an instrument maker for a year. He worked for long hours continuously in the cold workshop, during which his health declined.

In 1757 three professors offered Watt the opportunity to set up a small workshop Glasgow University. Watt was made responsible for the maintenance of the university's physics equipment. Two of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black who discovered carbon dioxide and the famed Adam Smith, became Watt's friends.

THE STEAM ENGINE 

In 1763 a professor brought Watt's attention to a Newcomen steam engine that was not working properly. Whilst repairing it, Watt noticed the engine had a major weakness. However hard he concentrated he couldn't think it through. The Scottish engineer decided to take a peaceful, relaxed Sunday afternoon walk in Glasgow Green, one of Glasgow's many parks. When he'd reached the golf house an idea popped into his head, which led him to develop his improved steam engine.

James Eckford Lauder: James Watt and the Steam Engine: 1855

In 1768, Watt entered into a partnership with John Roebuck, the founder of Carron Iron Works near Falkirk. The following year Watt took out the famous patent for "A New Invented Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines."

Iron workers in the 1760s were more like blacksmiths than modern machinists, and were unable to machine the piston and cylinder for Watt's steam engine with sufficient precision. Watt and Roebuck were as a consequence unable to make much money out of the Scottish engineer's invention. Watt was forced to take up employment—first as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer—for eight years. During this period he surveyed and planned the Coatbridge-Glasgow canal.

The partnership was a failure and Roebuck was forced to sell his share in Watt's engine to Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton in return for cancellation of a £1,200 debt.

After the failure of partnership with Roebuck, Watt's partnership with Boulton was more successful. Boulton supplied the drive and business acumen Watt needed and soon his new steam engine replaced Newcomen’s. Their partnership lasted until Boulton's death in 1809.

Watt continued to experiment and in 1781 he produced a steam engine, which incorporated a series of radical improvements, notably the closing off of the upper part of the cylinder, thereby making the low-pressure steam drive the top of the piston instead of the atmosphere. Whereas his earlier machine, with its up-and-down pumping action, was ideal for draining mines, this new rotary-motion steam engine could be used to drive many different types of machinery including paper and flour mills and spinning and weaving machines.

Engraving of a 1784 steam engine designed by Boulton and Watt.

In 1788 Watt made a further improvement when he patented a throttle valve to control the power of the engine, and a centrifugal governor to keep it from "running away". These improvements taken together produced an engine which was up to five times as efficient in its use of fuel as the Newcomen engine.

It wasn't until 1790s it became apparent in how many varied situations steam could be used and by 1800 it had replaced water as the main source of power of engines.

Steam was the first form of energy not reliant on wind or man's strength.

The Watt steam engine is credited for driving the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The oldest working engine in the world is the Smethwick Engine, a Watt steam engine made by Boulton and Watt, which was brought into service in May 1779. It is now at Thinktank in Birmingham (formerly at Birmingham's Museum of Science and Industry).

Smethwick Engine - world's oldest engine still in working order. By IMechE1

LATER CAREER 

In discussing animal power and particularly horse power, Watt estimated that a horse could do work equivalent to 33,000 ft⋅lbf/minone foot per minute. Because people used horses to pull carts in Watt's day, it was an amount of energy that could be understood by most people at that time and it was adopted as the standard power measurement by which engines are rated.

Boulton and Watt seized upon William Murdoch's invention of gas lighting. Their parliamentary lobbying resulted in gas street and domestic lighting.

Watt invented a mechanized method of copying manuscripts, the copying press. It became a commercial success and was widely used in offices even into the twentieth century.

By 1800 Watt had earned enough money to enable him to retire to his estate near Birmingham.

RELATIONSHIPS 

In 1764, Watts married his cousin Margaret Miller, with whom he had five children, but only two of them Gregory and Janet, reached their teens. His wife died in childbirth in 1772.

In 1777, Watts got married for a second time to Ann Macgregor, daughter of a Glasgow dye-maker. She bore him two more children who both also died at young ages.

Though at times Watts could be gloomy and cantankerous, he was a much sought-after conversationalist and companion, always interested in expanding his horizons. His personal relationships with his friends and partners were always congenial and long-lasting.

BELIEFS 

Watt was more interested in discussing scientific and philosophical questions than matters of religion. He belonged to the Lunar Society of Birmingham which met monthly to discuss scientific and philosophical questions. It was called thus because they would meet on the night of the full moon as the extra light made the journey home easier and safer in the absence of street lighting.

Other members of the group included Watt's business partner Matthew Boulton, the potter Joshua Wedgwood, the chemist Joseph Priestley and the freethinking poet, Erasmus Darwin. Venues included Erasmus Darwin's home in Lichfield and Matthew Boulton's residence, Soho House.

Watt was liberal in his political views.

PERSONAL LIFE 

In 1790, Matthew Boulton recommended to Watt his friend, the architect Samuel Wyatt, who had designed Boulton's home, Soho House. Watt commissioned Wyatt to design Heathfield Hall in Handsworth, Staffordshire.

Watt's workroom at Heathfield, painted in 1889 by Jonathon Pratt

In his later years Watt purchased an estate in mid-Wales at Doldowlod House, one mile south of Llanwrthwl, which he much improved.

Watt heated his study with a steam pipe connected to a boiler, and Matthew Boulton installed steam heating in a friend's Birmingham house.

Watt was devoted to and skilled in music. He once built an organ.

HEALTH, LAST YEARS AND DEATH 

A lifelong migraine sufferer, James Watt was a dreadful hypochondriac who was constantly complaining about every ailment under the sun.

Portrait of James Watt by Carl Frederik von Breda

After his retirement in 1800, Watt traveled to France and Germany with his second wife. He also revisited his hometown of Greenock in 1816.

James Watt passed peacefully away at Heathfield Hall on August 25, 1819 at the age of 83.

He was buried on September 2, 1819 in the graveyard of St Mary's Church, Handsworth.

Watt left over £60,000 (£81,000,000 in today's money) in his will to his family.

The metric unit of power, the Watt, is named after him despite Watt having nothing to do with electricity.

Source Famouspeople

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was born on  July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia).

Tesla, aged 34, circa 1890. Photo by Napoleon Sarony

Nikola's father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His mother was a housewife who was of Serbian descent. 

Tesla was born at midnight during a fierce thunderstorm. The midwife thought the storm was a bad omen, saying he would be a child of darkness. His mother replied, "No. He will be a child of light."

He was the fourth child out of five. He had one older brother, Dane, two older sisters, Angelina and Milka, and one younger sister, Marica.

The picture below shows Tesla's house (parish hall) in Smiljan where he was born, and the rebuilt church, where his father served. During the Yugoslav Wars, several of the buildings were severely damaged by fire. They were restored and reopened in 2006. 

By I, MayaSimFan, Wikipedia

Nikola was able to do integral calculus in his head, leading his teachers to believe he was cheating.
Nikola Tesla had a photographic memory.

Nikola Tesla's childhood cat, Macak, played a role in his famous contribution to science. decades later, he reflected upon the experience of static electricity after he stroked his black moggy. In a 1939 letter to a 12-year-old he wrote, "Is Nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? Day after day I have asked myself, what is electricity?"

Tesla got his first job in Budapest in 1882, working at a telephone company before moving to the United States two years later to work for Thomas Edison.

Edison once offered $50,000 to Tesla if he succeeded in improving the efficiency of his prototypical dynamos. Despite Tesla making a great deal of progress, Edison claimed that the offer was a joke.

They quarreled and soon Tesla started working on his own with other people investing in his work. He set up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. On May 16, 1888 Nikola Tesla delivered a lecture describing the equipment which would allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.

Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo-electric machine  in an 1888 U.S. Patent 390,721

Five years later, Nikola Tesla gave the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis. In 1898, at the Electrical Exhibition held at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla successfully demonstrated a radio-controlled boat. He was awarded U.S. patent No. 613,809 for a "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles."

Nikola Tesla installed the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls in 1896. Around this time Tesla disavowed coal and oil in favor of renewable energy sources.

Nikola Tesla developed the idea for smartphone technology in 1901. By 1909, he'd conceptualized the first integration of data signals with telephony.

Tesla was 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighed 142 pounds (64 kg) with dark, deep-set eyes, He had almost almost no weight variance from 1888 to about 1926.

He was also an elegant, stylish figure in New York City, a fastidious dresser who was fascinating company when he felt like being social. However, much of Tesla’s personal life remains a mystery, and he never married.

Nikola Tesla, c. 1896

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt was romantically interested in Tesla; however, he rejected her on the grounds that she distracted him from his work. 

Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain were good pals. They met at a club in New York and struck up a friendship. Tesla even helped Twain with some gastrointestinal issues by having Twain stand on an oscillating platform for 90 seconds, causing him to run for the bathroom!

He openly expressed disgust for overweight people. Once, Tesla fired his secretary solely because of her weight.

Nikola Tesla could not stand the sight of pearls, to the extent that he refused to speak to women wearing them.

Tesla was an advocate of sterilizing criminals and people with mental problems, and he believed that by 2100 people that aren't "desireable parents" shouldn't be able to breed.

Tesla was very fond of pigeons and took to feeding them at the window of his hotel room and bringing the injured ones in to nurse back to health.

Nikola Tesla once spent over $2,000 on an injured white pigeon. The amount includes building a device that comfortably supported her so her bones could heal. "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life," he said of her. 

In 1922, Nikola Tesla imagined that his favorite pigeon told him that she was dying. When she actually did shortly after, he said that "something went out of his life and he knew his life's work was finished".

Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died of coronary thrombosis in a hotel room in Manhattan, New York City on January 7, 1943.

During World War II,  the Japanese built a death ray inspired by ideas from Nikola Tesla. The problem was that enemies would have to stand perfectly still for 10 minutes before it would work. 

Nikola Tesla once paid an overdue hotel bill with a 'working model' of his 'death beam'. He warned the management never to open it without taking proper precautions to avoid detonation. After his death, the box was pried open and they found nothing but a bunch of old lab components.

Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity after his death. However in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. Since then his reputation has experienced a comeback in popular culture.

The statue of Nikoli Tesla in Silicon Valley provides free WiFi.

George Stephenson

EARLY LIFE 

George Stephenson was born on June 9, 1781 in Wylam, Northumberland, which is 9 miles (15 km) west of Newcastle upon Tyne.

George Stephenson

He was the second child of Robert and Mabel Stephenson, neither of whom could read or write.

George's father worked at a coal mine as a fireman feeding coal into the furnace of the steam engine.

CAREER 

Stephenson left school at early age and got a lowly paid job as a cowherd, before getting work helping his father as fireman at Water Row Pit in Newburn. By the age of 17 Stephenson was in charge of the steam engine there.

In his early teen years, Stephenson couldn't read or write but he paid 4p a week for night school lessons out of his earnings as a fireman.

In 1801, Stephenson began work at Black Callerton Colliery as a 'brakesman', controlling the winding gear at the pit. After getting married, Stephenson made shoes and mended clocks to supplement his income.

His skill with steam-driven machinery became well known and one day Stephenson was called to another coalmine. He mended the steam engine there and was given the important job of engineer at the Killingworth collieries.

Aware of the explosions often caused in mines by naked flames, Stephenson devised a safety lamp for use at Killingworth Colliery, that would burn in a gaseous atmosphere without causing an explosion. Cornishman Humphry Davy was also looking at the problem and came up with his own lamp at the same time.

For his invention Davy was awarded £2,000, whilst Stephenson was accused of stealing the idea from the Cornish chemist, because he was not seen as an adequate scientist who could have produced the lamp by any approved scientific method. However, Stephenson's lamp was widely adopted in the north of England.

Stephenson's safety lamp shown with Davy's lamp on the left

In 1814 Stephenson persuaded the manager of the Killingworth colliery to allow him to build a steam-powered travelling engine. The locomotive he built designed for hauling coal on the Killingworth wagonway, was named after the Prussian general Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. The Blücher locomotive could haul 30 tons of coal up a hill at 4 mph (6.4 km/h), and was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive. Altogether, Stephenson is said to have produced 16 locomotives at Killingworth.

One of the Killingworth engines

In 1821, a parliamentary bill was passed to allow the building of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public railway. Stephenson surveyed the line in 1821, and assisted by his eighteen-year-old son Robert, construction began the same year.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway opened on September 27, 1825 using George Stephenson's eight ton no. 1 engine, called Locomotion. Driven by Stephenson, Locomotion hauled an 80-ton load of coal and flour. In addition, the first purpose-built passenger car, Experiment, was attached and carried dignitaries on the opening journey.

The No. 1 engine, called Locomotion, for the Stockton & Darlington Railway

It was the first time passenger traffic had been run on a steam locomotive railway. Stephenson's steam locomotive raced along at an average 15 mph reaching a speed of 24 miles per hour (39 kilometres per hour) on one stretch. At that time most people believed nobody could survive speeds above 16 mph so there was some alarm.

The gauge Stephenson chose for the Stockton and Darlington Railway line was 4 feet 8 1⁄2 inches (1,435 mm). Sometimes called the "Stephenson gauge", it subsequently was adopted as the standard gauge for most of the world's railways.

In 1829 Stephenson built the eight ton The Rocket which entered and won the Rainhill Trials, the competition to see which engine would be used on the Liverpool and Manchester railway. Stephenson was awarded the then huge sum of £500 as his prize.

Rocket (1829) Replica. By Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK 

The grand opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway took place on September 15, 1830. The line included the famous Rainhill Skew Bridge, which was the first bridge to cross any railway at an angle. It was designed with a skew span of 54 feet (16 m), in order to give a clear span across the railway of 30 feet (9.1 m) at a skew angle of 56° . Stephenson built a full-sized wooden model in an adjacent field before completing the bridge in 1830.

The Liverpool and Manchester railway was a resounding success. Stephenson became famous, and was offered the position of chief engineer for a wide variety of other railways.

Stephenson established his company as the pre-eminent builder of steam locomotives used on railways in the United Kingdom, the United States and much of Europe.

The talented engineer once invented a cucumber straightener, a transparent glass tube open at one end in which a half grown cucumber was placed and as it continued to grow it straightened.

PERSONAL LIFE 

George Stephenson fell in love with Anne Henderson when he lodged with her family. She was not interested in him, so he transferred his attentions to her sister Frances (Fanny), who was nine years his senior. George and Fanny married at Newburn Church on November 28, 1802.

Their first child Robert was born in 1803, and their second child, a daughter was born in July 1805. She was named Frances after her mother. Little Frances died after just three weeks and was buried in St Bartholomew's Parish Church near Newcastle.

In 1806 George's wife Frances died probably of consumption (tuberculosis). She was buried in the same churchyard as their daughter on May 16, 1806.

George Stephenson married for the second time on March 29, 1820, when he wed Betty Hindmarsh at Newburn. The marriage seems to have been happy, but there were no children and Betty died in 1845.

Stephenson got married for the third time, to Ellen Gregory, on January 11, 1848 at St John's Church in Shrewsbury. She had been his housekeeper.

Stephenson realized the value of education and paid to study at night school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic until the age of 18. Once he learnt to read, he liked to learn all he could about engines.

The cottage at Wylam, Northumberland, where Stephenson was born still stands.

Dial Cottage. By Bill Henderson,

Stephenson's home from 1804 was Dial Cottage on Great Lime Road at Killingworth, Tyne and Wear, near Newcastle. 
Stephenson constructed the Blücher travelling engine in the colliery workshop behind his Dial Cottage home.

George Stephenson moved to the parish of Alton Grange (now part of Ravenstone) in Leicestershire in 1830.

Stephenson remained at Alton Grange until 1838 before moving to Tapton House north east of Chesterfield in Derbyshire.

LAST YEARS AND DEATH 

After Stephenson settled into semi-retirement, he spent his time supervising his mining interests in Derbyshire. The tunneling for the North Midland Railway revealed a rich seam of coal lying under Chesterfield town and he formed a company to work it.

Six months after marrying his third wife, Stephenson contracted pleurisy and died, aged 67, on August 12, 1848 at Tapton House in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.

The "father of railways" was buried at Holy Trinity Church, Chesterfield, alongside his second wife.

From 1990 until 2003, Stephenson's portrait appeared on the reverse of Series E £5 notes issued by the Bank of England. Stephenson's face was shown alongside an engraving of the Rocket steam engine and the Skerne Bridge on the Stockton to Darlington Railway.

Source Food For Thought by Ed Pearce

Noah

NOAH'S ARK

Thousands of years ago the Hebrew farmer Noah was the only person left who remembered God and his creation. The world was flooded with evil and God's response to the severe situation was to have Noah and his family build an ark that enabled them to survive a widespread flood over the Earth. The rest of humanity was wiped out.

According to Book of Genesis, the Ark was 450ft by 75ft and 45ft high- that is taller than a three-storey building and with a deck size of 36 tennis courts.

Noah was the first great ship builder and his ark was constructed out of cypress wood.

The Building of Noah's Ark (painting by a French master of 1675).

On board his ark Noah included at least one pair of every kind of animal, (seven pairs of every type of clean animal, which was used for sacrifice.) Noah needed around 40,000 animals to represent every kind of creature.

Biblical scholars have long asserted November 25, 2348 to be the day of the Great Deluge, or Flood.

After the Great Flood the Hebrew Noah landed his ark on the summit of the Ararat mountain range - the highest part of the Caucasus, where grapes originated. He alighted from the ark, planted a vineyard and got drunk on some of its wine.

After the great flood it is said that Noah made a pudding with all the food remaining on board: beans, chickpeas, dried fruits, nuts, rice and wheat.

The name Noah means 'rest'.

A group of fourth year master's students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester calculated that Noah's ark, built to accommodate at least two of every animal species, would have floated using the dimensions ordained in the Bible.

Various replicas of the Ark exist. The one at Johan's Ark in Dordrecht, Netherlands is the only full-scale Ark interpretation that is actually floating and mobile.

Replica of Noah's Ark in Dordrecht, Netherlands. By Ceinturion - Wikipedia

OTHER ACCOUNTS OF THE GREAT FLOOD

Other people groups recount similar stories such as the Babylonian flood tale from the Epic of Gilgameash.

The Bakossi people of the Mungo River in Cameroon have a legend that their ancestor Ngoe built an ark to save his family and many animals from a great flood.

Noah, or Nug, is one of the main prophets of Islam. In the Quran, his wife is said to drown in the flood.

An Islamic depiction of Noah in a 16th-century Mughal miniature.

Source Food For Thought by Ed Pearce

Elon Musk

EARLY LIFE

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in apartheid-era Pretoria, South Africa, to Maye Musk, a Canadian model and dietitian, and Errol Musk, an engineer who at one time was part-owner of an emerald mine in Zambia. Musk and his father have had a notoriously fraught relationship; they are now estranged, which, by Musk’s own account, is not terribly surprising.

At age 12, the young Elon taught himself programming and sold a space-themed computer game called Blastar for around $500. 

He would later claim to have tested his entrepreneurial mettle by living for a month on just $1 a day. His menu largely consisted of hot dogs and oranges.

As a teenager, he tried (and spectacularly failed) to master the frontside ollie on a beat‑up skateboard. He still prefers walking on Mars to ollieing in Cape Town.

At 17, Musk left South Africa to avoid military service and moved to Canada with his mother and siblings. He studied at Queen’s University in Ontario before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned degrees in Physics and Economics. He briefly enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford University but dropped out after two days—to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

BUSINESS CAREER

1995 – Musk co‑founded Zip2, his first software company, which provided an online business directory and mapping service. 

1999 – After selling Zip2, he co‑founded X.com, an online payment company that would later merge into PayPal. 

2000 Musk contracted one of the deadliest strains of malaria after visiting Brazil and South Africa. He nearly died, lost 45 pounds, and took six months to recover. The brush with death allegedly gave him a new sense of focus.

2002 – Following PayPal’s acquisition by eBay, Musk became a naturalized U.S. citizen and founded SpaceX, positioning himself as its CEO and chief engineer. Six years later SpaceX launched its first ever private spacecraft, the Falcon 1 into orbit.

SpaceX CEO Musk in 2019

2004 While he's synonymous with Tesla, he wasn't its founder. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded the company, and in 2004 Musk led Tesla’s Series A funding round, becoming an early investor.

2008 – Musk assumed the roles of CEO and product architect at Tesla, steering it toward mass‑market electric vehicles.

2013 Musk conceptualized the Hyperloop , a high-speed transportation system, although he's primarily focused on his other ventures

In 2000, Musk contracted one of the deadliest strains of malaria after visiting Brazil and South Africa. He nearly died, lost 45 pounds, and took six months to recover. The brush with death allegedly gave him a new sense of focus.

2000 Early in the COVID‑19 pandemic, Musk touted home-made ventilator designs and even shipped surplus Tesla parts to hospitals. He later speculated on Twitter that wearing an N95 mask was “overkill” — though he did quietly slip one on when touring Ford’s EV plant.

2001 Despite (or perhaps because of) his unpredictable persona, Musk was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2021, the same year Tesla became the world’s most valuable carmaker and joined the $1 trillion club. Since that time Musk has been the richest person on the planet.

2022 In October 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, declaring: “The bird is freed.” It was the start of one of the most chaotic platform overhauls in tech history.

Musk didn’t just buy Twitter—he remixed it. Within days, he fired top executives, dissolved the board, and declared himself "Chief Twit." He slashed the company’s workforce by more than half, reinstated previously banned accounts (including Donald Trump’s), and overhauled Twitter’s verification system—replacing the familiar blue check with a paid subscription under Twitter Blue, which promptly led to a flood of impersonations, pranks, and brand confusion.

In July 2023, Musk made the most dramatic move of all: he killed the Twitter name. The platform was rebranded as X, a nod to Musk’s decades-long obsession with the letter. The blue bird logo was replaced with a minimalist X, and Musk announced plans to turn the platform into an “everything app”—a sort of Western WeChat, combining messaging, banking, shopping, and more.

The rebrand was met with widespread confusion, not least because the word “tweet” had become a globally recognized verb. Musk insisted the change was about moving beyond the original purpose of the platform, tweeting: “Twitter was acquired by X Corp to serve as an accelerant for X, the everything app.”

Elon Musk officially became the world's first US-dollar trillionaire on June 12, 2026. The milestone was triggered by the IPO of SpaceX on the Nasdaq, which saw shares open with an 11% jump above the initial offering price of $135. Musk's stake in SpaceX alone was valued at more than $766 billion, and when combined with his Tesla holdings of approximately $280 billion, his total net worth reached roughly $1.05–$1.1 trillion, depending on the source.

POLITICAL CAREER

Musk’s political leanings are notoriously fluid. Once a darling of the green left for popularizing electric cars, he later became a libertarian tech messiah and now sometimes sounds like a cranky uncle on Twitter/X  He has described himself at various times as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative,” “moderate,” “independent,” and in 2022 declared he would now vote Republican, claiming the Democratic Party had become “the party of division & hate.”

During Donald Trump's second administration, Elon Musk was placed in charge of a newly created "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE, with a mandate to cut federal spending and streamline bureaucracy.

Musk with Trump in 2024

PERSONAL LIFE 

Musk’s eccentricity is not limited to naming his companies “X” and digging tunnels. In May 2020, he and his then-partner, musician Grimes (Claire Boucher), named their son X Æ A-12 (later changed to X Æ A-XII to satisfy California naming laws). Their daughter, born in 2021, was named Exa Dark Sideræl. His children from his first marriage to Justine Wilson have names that sound almost Victorian by comparison: Griffin, Xavier, Kai, Saxon, and Damian.

In 2018, Musk raised eyebrows by smoking cannabis on a live podcast and calling a Thai cave rescue diver a “pedo guy.” 

Musk owns a Lotus Esprit that was used in the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. He reportedly wants to convert it into a real-life submarine car.

Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron Man films was partly inspired by Elon Musk.

Musk has made cameo appearances in films and TV shows, including Iron Man 2, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, South Park, and Rick and Morty.

He holds triple citizenship, South African, Canadian, and American.

Elon Musk is a fan of Marvels X-men comics, and has named robots at Tesla factories after X-men characters.

He believes humanity is living in a computer simulation and that life on Earth is essentially doomed—hence his obsession with Mars. It may be pure coincidence, or it may be cosmic irony, that in Wernher von Braun’s 1952 book Project Mars, the Martian colony is led by a man named... Elon.

Source CNBCTV18

Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in in a farmhouse about 1.9 miles (3 km) from the small Tuscan hill town of Vinci. The town is situated in the lower valley of the Arno river in what was the territory of the Medici-ruled Republic of Florence.

Casa Leonardo, where Leonardo da Vinci is believed to have been born

He was the illegitimate son of Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine provincial lawyer and Caterina, a peasant woman. Leonardo had many half brothers and sisters.

As he was born before modern naming conventions developed in Europe, his full name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which means "Leonardo, son of Mister Piero, from Vinci" (as in Vinci, Florence).

Leonardo himself simply signed his works "Leonardo" or "Io, Leonardo" ("I, Leonardo"). Most authorities therefore refer to his works as "Leonardos", not "da Vincis". It is assumed he did not use his father's name because of his illegitimate status.

Leonardo spent his first five years in the home of his mother, then from 1457 he lived at his father's family estate in Vinci. Here, Leonardo started drawing and painting. His early sketches were of such quality that his father soon showed them to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio who subsequently took the fourteen-year old Leonardo on as an apprentice.

The young Leonardo studied many things, mastering them then putting them aside. After nine months of studying arithmetic he was baffling his master with questions. However his classroom education ended at the age of 15.  Leonardo never learnt to speak Latin or Greek which meant he was scoffed at by his contemporaries.

CAREER 

His illegitimacy barred him from a profession like that of his lawyer father. In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Verrocchio,  the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day.

In 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine. His attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him.

Between 1471-81 Leonardo had various independent commissions, and was accepted into the Painters Guild at Florence.

In 1482 Leonardo was appointed State Engineer, Court Painter and Director of Court Festivals to Lodovico Sforza (Duke of Milan) in Milan. It was there he painted his classic The Last Supper (see below).

When he was working for the Duke of Milan, one of Leonardo's responsibilities was playing the lute and singing to him.

In 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI. He spent a year acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron.

Between 1503-16, Leonardo had various independent commissions in Florence, Milan and Rome.

In 1516, Leonardo was in employment of King Francis I of France at 700 crowns a year. He was given the title of “First Painter, Architect and Mechanic of the King”.

Leonardo spent much of his time in King Francis’ employment studying ways and means of making the Loire River navigable.

PAINTING  AND SCULPTURES

His artistic genius was first noted when working as an apprentice to Andrea Del Verrocchio, Leonardo inserted a head of an angel of such perfection into Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ that his master vowed never to paint again.

Leonardo had a weakness for grotesque, curiously shaped heads and had a habit of following men and women with strange features. A hairy head would attract his attention for a whole day, then he would return home and reproduce it as a sculpture.

Truly ambidextrous, Leonardo could paint with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473.

The Arno Valley

Leonardo spent several years painting a representation of Jesus' last Passover meal for the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie on the wall of their convent in Milan. The Last Supper was completed on February 9, 1498.

Originally commissioned between 1503 and 1506, Leonardo finished his famous Mona Lisa (see below) painting a decade later while in the employment of King Francis of France, though he still didn’t consider it finished.

His model for Mona Lisa was one Lisa Del Giocana, whose silk merchant husband commissioned a portrait of her. Leonardo spent so long painting it that the husband terminated the sitting and refused to pay for the portrait.

According to Giogio Vasari's life of Leonardo, the legendary artist employed musicians and jesters to keep the smirking model merry and stop her fidgeting.

On one occasion Leonardo used his housekeeper to model a frightened woman. To help her achieve a petrified look he set himself on fire and painted the expression of horror on her face.

Leonardo invented in art "aerial perspective" whereby the misty atmosphere blurs and changes colors of the landscape as it dissolves into the distance. "All our knowledge has it's origins in our perceptions," he said.

In his time Leonardo was thought of as an also-run, a mere practitioner of the mechanical arts. Art was seen in his day as a craft on a par with baking and weaving.

Even in the nineteenth century not everyone rated him. The artist Renoir cattily said of Leonardo: "He bores me, he should have stuck to his flying machines."

Only 17 paintings that can definitely be attributed to Leonardo survive today, not all finished.

The only Da Vinci painting to be in private hands is The Madonna and the Yardwinder owned by the Duke of Buccleuch.  The painting has been lent to the National Gallery of Scotland (now the Scottish National Gallery) since 2009,

SCIENTIFIC, ENGINEERING AND INVENTIONS 

Leonardo's real interest was engineering and design. He was forever doodling with ideas sometimes to the detriment of his public commissions.

Leonardo designed a diving helmet of leather. It was furnished with spikes to protect the diver from monsters and a breathing tube stretched from the helmet to the surface with a cork float.

While working for the Duke of Milan Leonardo developed a keen interest in canal building. He worked out how to divert the River Arno. After 2000 workmen toiled for six months to no avail the project was aborted.

In 1510 Leonardo designed a horizontal water wheel which was a forerunner of the modern water turbine.

Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. It is unknown for what occasion the mechanical lion was made but it is believed to have greeted King Francis I of France at his entry into Lyon and perhaps was used for the peace talks between the French king and Pope Leo X in Bologna.

Leonardo invented an early alarm clock, which woke the sleeper by gently rubbing his feet.

A pacifist, Leonardo booby-trapped his designs to prevent his militaristic patrons using him to wage war. For instance, he sketched a combat vehicle with some resemblance to a tank.with gearing that could never work in practice.

He sketched in his Codex Atlanticus dated to around 1485 a possible parachute. Leonardo said of it "If a man has a tent 12 braccia wide and 12 high covered with cloth, he can throw himself down from any great height without hurting himself."

The feasibility of Leonardo's parachute design was successfully tested in 2000 by Briton Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by Luigi Cani.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to explain why the sky is blue.

ANATOMY, MEDICAL AND NATURE

The Pope once refused permission to Leonardo to study anatomy at a hospital in Rome. Later he dissected corpses, which at the time was still considered a taboo practice.

Da Vinci did the first accurate and detailed anatomical drawings including showing the function of the heart valves and cavities of the brain.

Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man (see below) is is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. It is regarded as a cultural icon,being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin and T-shirts.

In his Codex on the Eye Leonardo suggested immersing a patient's eye in a water filled tube sealed with a lens for correcting sight defects.

Da Vinci had a rare brain condition known as "Double Hemisphere Action" which meant he could
simultaneously write different sentences with his right and left hand and carry on a quite unconnected conversation.

Leonardo was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk reveals its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings indicated the annual moisture.

JOURNALS AND NOTES 

Leonardo left 5,000 pages of jokes, dabblings, drawings, doodles, inventions and lists known as his note books.

Leonardo da Vinci used "mirror writing" (from right side of page to left) for his personal and private notes. This helped prevent others from stealing his ideas, protected his scientific theories from scrutiny by the Roman Catholic Church, and as a left-hander, also eliminated smudging.

The hidden treasures of Leonardo's notebooks languished unknown and unpublished for over 200 years after his death in trunks in outhouses.700 pages were found and 31 notebooks are preserved today.

The Codex Leicester, a collection of Leonardo's writings and drawings 1508-10 became the world’s most expensive book of any kind when it was sold for $30,802,500. to Bill Gates on November 11, 1994.

After Bill Gates purchased the Da Vinci Codex, he had it scanned for use as a wallpaper on Windows '95.

Page of the Codex Leicester

A volume of his drawings with Leonardo's legendary right to left writing is now in the Royal collection at Windsor Castle.

PERSONAL LIFE 

A strikingly handsome, tall man, Leonardo was described by people who knew him as "The most beautiful man who ever lived." As he got older, Leonardo developed an expansive grey beard.

Leonardo dressed as a dandy and wore the finest clothes. In his younger days he was proud of his rose colored tunics.

Reputedly a man of great strength. With his right hand, Leonardo could bend the ring of an iron door knocker or a horseshoe as if they were lead.

A charming man with a lovable disposition, he kept his servants well and fed and sheltered many friends. Strong willed, persuasive but Leonardo suffered from a  regal spirit and was full of airs and graces.

Leonardo kept his private life particularly secret, and there is no evidence that he was ever intimately involved with any woman, nor in a close friendship with one. He frequently drew bejeweled women with grotesquely ugly heads.

He surrounded himself with handsome young men throughout his life, and his art reflects an appreciation of androgynous beauty. It has, therefore, been assumed that Leonardo was a homosexual in a city (Florence) that was noted for it,

At the age of 23 Leonardo,along with three friends was accused of sodomy with a 17 year-old model, Jacopo Saltarelli, who was a notorious male prostitute. After two months in jail, he was acquitted as no witnesses had stepped forward. For some time afterwards, Leonardo and the others were kept under observation by Florence's Officers of the Night - a sort of Renaissance vice squad,

One of his loves may have been Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno (nicknamed Salai (Little Devil)). Gian entered Leonardo's household around 1488 at the age of ten, becoming his servant and assistant. Though Salai was always introduced as Leonardo's "pupil", he never produced any work of artistic merit.

In 1506, Leonardo met Count Francesco Melzi, the fifteen year old son of a Lombard aristocrat. Salai eventually accepted Melzi's continued presence and the three undertook various journeys throughout Italy.

Leonardo had many other friends who are now figures renowned in their fields, or for their influence on history; these included Niccolò Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia.

Leonardo and Michelangelo had a long-running feud. Michelangelo taunted Leonardo over his inability to complete many of his works, while Leonardo mocked his foe for his sculptures' exaggerated muscles.

Rather than having one long sleep every night Leonardo tended to doze for twenty minutes every two hours.

Leonardo studied music and soon could improvise and play the lyre but he didn't stick at it.

In 1516 King Francis persuaded Leonardo to settle in France at the Château du Clos Lucé (or simply Clos Lucé) near Amboise in the Loire Valley. This red brick manor house is now a museum of his many achievements.

BELIEFS 

Leonardo once came up with a partially automated spit for roasting meat that turned over a fire as hot gases flow up a chimney, driven by a fan-like structure  The inventive artist and engineer was unlikely to develop the contraption for himself as he didn't eat meat. Indeed he was such a fervent vegetarian that he was known to buy caged birds from poultry vendors and set them free.

Leonardo was the first painter of religious subjects to show biblical characters looking like ordinary men without halos.

In his twilight years, Leonardo became increasingly devoutly religious and was tormented by an unnamed terrible sin. A brilliant man with a low boredom threshold, he was the embodiment of the Renaissance spirit having distinguished himself in a number of different fields from anatomy to aerodynamics. On his deathbed he confessed towards how greatly he had offended God by not working on his God given artistic talent more.

DEATH AND LEGACY  

Leonardo da Vinci died at his Château du Clos Lucé home in France on May 2, 1519, According to his wish, 60 beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise.

Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818

Melzi was his principal heir and executor, but Salai was not forgotten: he received half of Leonardo's vineyard. Leonardo also remembered his servant Battista di Vilussis, who received the other half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and a servant woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.

The actor Leonardo DiCaprio's first name derives from his German-born mother Irmalin's having experienced a sudden kick from her unborn boy while standing in front of a da Vinci painting in Italy.

Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes was born in Humble, Texas on December 24, 1905 to a rich family,

As a boy, Howard showed an ability to build things with wires and scraps of metal.

Photo of Hughes taken in April 1912

Howard Hughes withdrew from Rice University shortly after his father's death in 1924.

On June 1, 1925, Hughes married Ella Botts Rice, socialite daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston.  Soon after their marriage, Howard and Ella moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself making movies.

In 1929,  Ella, returned to her home city and filed for divorce.

Hughes went on to date many famous women, including Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters. They divorced fourteen years later.

Jean Peters in the trailer for the film Broken Lance (1954)

Hughes entered the entertainment industry after marrying and moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself as a film-maker.

His first two films, Everybody's Acting (1927) and Two Arabian Knights (1928), were financial successes, the latter winning the first Academy Award for Best Director of a comedy picture.

From the late 1920s, Hughes made big-budget and often controversial films like Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932), and The Outlaw (1943).

Photo of Howard Hughes in 1938.

Howard Hughes suffered from chronic constipation. He filled his many hours on a toilet by reading heaps of books and magazines for stories for his movies.

Hughes was an excellent golfer from a young age, often scoring near par figures, and held a handicap of three during his twenties. He played frequently with top players, including Gene Sarazen.

Jack Dempsey once knocked-out  Howard Hughes. Hughes wanted to see "what it would be like to spar with the heavyweight champion".

Howard Hughes was a lifelong aircraft enthusiast and pilot setting multiple world air speed records. He set a world airspeed record of 352 mph in 1935 in his H-1 racing landplane, which had an aluminium fuselage and wooden wings. Hughes walked away unscathed after he ran out of fuel and had to crash land in a California beet field.

Flying his H-1 Racer, Hughes set a transcontinental airspeed record on January 19, 1937 by flying non-stop from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds (beating his own previous record of 9 hours, 27 minutes). His average ground speed over the flight was 322 mph (518 km/h).

After a 1946 plane crash, Howard Hughes decided he did not like the design of the hospital bed he was laying in. He called in plant engineers to help him come up with a customized bed specifically to alleviate the pain caused by moving with severe burn injuries. Despite the fact that he never had the chance to use the bed that he designed, Hughes' bed served as a prototype for the modern hospital bed

The "Spruce Goose," or H-4 The Hercules was the largest aircraft ever built. It was piloted by its designer Howard Hughes on its first and only flight on November 2, 1947. It flew on November 2, 1947, for one mile, at a maximum altitude of 70 feet.

The 140-ton eight-engine seaplane was made of birch and had a wingspan of 320 feet. It was built as a prototype troop transport, but after it was rejected by the Pentagon, Hughes put the plane into storage, never to be flown again.

H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose"

In 1966, Hughes arrived at the Desert Inn hotel in Las Vegas, renting the two top floors. When the management asked him when he was leaving, ten days later, Hughes purchased the hotel for $13.2 million, half of which he paid in cash.

In the last ten years of his life, 1966 to 1976, Hughes lived in hotels in many cities, always taking up residence in the top floor penthouse.

Howard Hughes kept a ruler in his hotel room to measure any peas he ordered, sending back those that were 'too big'.

Howard Hughes' aides shipped 350 gallons of his favorite ice cream from LA : Baskin-Robbins' banana nut. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes said he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla. Desert Inn ended up distributing free banana nut to casino customers for a year.

To ease his insomnia, Hughes once reportedly bought a local TV station, KLAS, so they would show movies all night.

Hughes was reported to have died on April 5, 1976 of kidney failure, at 1:27 p.m. on board an aircraft en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Fairmont Princess Hotel in Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas.

His reclusive activities made Hughes practically unrecognizable when he died. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6 ft 4 in frame weighed barely 90 pounds, and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body.

Howard Hughes is buried in the Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, next to his parents.

Hughes Family Gravesite at Glenwood Cemetery. Wikipedia Commons