Word: inventors
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...Namaths, Henry Kissingers or Valerie Perrines of this world. The Robertson laurels go to "Manchester Jack," the first lion tamer (1835); M. Jolly-Bellin, first dry cleaner (1849); William Kemmler, first man to die in the electric chair (1890), and the late great George Crum, inventor of the first potato chip (1853). Surrounding these immortals is a pantheon of some 6,000 achievers and achievements, each one a monument to ingenuity or perversity. En masse, they provide the best argument settler since the first dictionary (Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, 1604). After The Book of Firsts, there should...
...outspoken master basketball coach whose foghorn voice won him his nickname, and whose dedication to the sport won him the honorary title of Mr. Basketball; in Lawrence, Kans. Allen's basketball career began while he was an undergraduate at the U. of Kansas, where he played for the inventor of the game, Dr. James Naismith. After medical school (osteopathy) and several years of coaching other Midwestern teams, Allen returned to Kansas and guided the Jayhawks to 24 conference championships. He retired in 1956, leaving a record (771 games won, 233 lost for a .768 percentage over his 46-year...
...Scottish parson and part-time inventor named Robert Stirling patented a new engine for pumping water out of mines and quarries. It could run on almost any fuel, he boasted-including whisky. Indeed the parson had such faith in his engine that he often cut his Sunday sermons short to work on it. For all his enthusiasm, though, when Stirling died in 1878 at the age of 88, his engine was still unperfected. Soon it was totally overshadowed by the newer gasoline-powered internal combustion engine...
...very satisfying, but even better is the way Director Valerii has embellished a traditional western plain song with eccentric bursts of baroque invention. A disciple of Sergio Leone, inventor and master of the spaghetti western, Valerii has found a way to have fun with his form without indulging in parody or resorting to bloody excesses that have marred so many recent westerns. There is his handling of the Wild Bunch, which he converts into a men acing abstraction: a cloud of dust, a thunder of hoofs, an excess rendered so mysterious by distance that it is hard to know whether...
...pages of such periodicals a pageant of figures appear, anonyms to the general public, but legends to the expanding magicians' fraternity: Derek Dingle, an air-conditioning engineer whom most magicians consider the greatest card manipulator extant; Percy Diaconis, a Harvard Ph.D. in statistics and inventor of more than 100 card sleights that have fooled professional gamblers; Martin Gardner, a science writer who can make the language of numbers appear as easy as pi (see box); Robert Hummer, a mathematical genius who would sleep on the floor rather than rearrange the cards...