Facts about famous people
Famous people accumulate stories, and only some of them are true. The entries in this category stick to documented episodes: the patents, the letters, the odd habits recorded by people who were actually there. Where a story is commonly retold in an exaggerated form, the explanation says so, which makes these facts safer to repeat than the version that usually circulates online.
Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented a radio technique that underlies Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
In 1942, Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented a frequency-hopping system to stop enemy ships jamming radio-guided torpedoes. The US Navy ignored it for decades.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his notes backwards, in mirror writing.
His thousands of pages of notebooks run from right to left with reversed letters, readable in a mirror. He wrote normally when the text was intended for other people.
Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes.
Curie handled radium with her bare hands and kept samples in her desk drawers, so her papers, furniture and even her cookbook absorbed radiation. Visitors to the French national library must sign a waiver to read the notebooks.
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel and turned it down.
After the death of Israel's first president in 1952, the prime minister offered the largely ceremonial post to Einstein. He declined, writing that he lacked the aptitude and experience to deal with people.
Before writing Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl was a fighter pilot and worked in British intelligence.
Dahl flew Hurricanes for the Royal Air Force in the Second World War and survived a crash in the Libyan desert. Posted to Washington in 1942, he passed information to British intelligence while charming American high society.
Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony when he was almost completely deaf.
His hearing began failing in his late twenties and was nearly gone by the time the Ninth premiered in 1824. At the end of the performance he had to be turned around to see the audience applauding.
As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and told them their ransom was too low.
Captured in the Aegean around 75 BC, Caesar reportedly laughed at the pirates' demand and insisted they ask for more than double. While waiting for the ransom he joked that he would return and crucify them all.
Isaac Newton spent his later years running the Royal Mint and hunting down counterfeiters.
Appointed Warden of the Mint in 1696, Newton went undercover in London taverns, gathered evidence and personally interrogated suspects. Several forgers were hanged as a result of his work.
Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist of all time, once disappeared for eleven days.
In December 1926 her car was found abandoned and a huge search was launched, with more than a thousand police officers and even Arthur Conan Doyle consulting a medium. She was found at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under the surname of her husband's mistress.
Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent.
In 1849 he patented a device for lifting boats over sandbars and shallows using inflatable bellows attached to the hull. The idea came from his own experience getting stuck while working on riverboats.
Before he was a martial arts legend, Bruce Lee won the Hong Kong cha-cha championship.
Lee took the title in 1958 at the age of 18, the same year he also won an interschool boxing tournament. He reportedly paid for lessons on the ship to America by teaching cha-cha.
Queen Elizabeth II trained as a truck mechanic and driver during the Second World War.
In 1945, at 18, the future queen joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and learned to change tyres, strip engines and drive heavy vehicles. She was the first female member of the royal family to serve full time in the armed forces.