Scientists & Inventors

Some discoveries are so ordinary now that we forget anyone made them. The people who made them led lives far stranger than the textbook version.

Nikola Tesla, a Serbian engineer born in the Austrian Empire, helped put alternating current into the world’s homes. The man who helped light the world died in debt, in Room 3327 of a New York hotel.

Marie Curie was a Polish governess who studied at an illegal underground university. She went on to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. The radiation she studied almost certainly killed her, and her notebooks are still radioactive.

Both films tell the whole life, not just the discovery: where they came from, what they gave up, and what their work cost them. Each one comes with a written dispatch that lists every source we used, so you can read further.