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Even the dumbest schoolchildren can name history's great inventors: Leonardo, inventor of the helicopter; Franklin, inventor of lightning; and Diddy, inventor of the remix. But history is replete with examples of creators whose toil was no less honest, yet whose names have not become the stuff of legend. Here are just a few unjustly overlooked inventors, and the things they made:
1. Greg Melancholy
In September 1962, on the campus of the University of Minnesota, a junior with the now-unlikely name of Greg Melancholy was sitting in the student union over a cup of copy looking out a window.
He had an inscrutable look on his face which his friend, Rex Bicker, interpreted as sadness.
"Why so glum, chum?" Bicker, president of the campus Auto Club, asked as he sat down across from his sophomore year roommate.
"Oh, I'm not glum, really," Melancholy said with a sigh. "I guess it's more of a feeling of thoughtful sadness characterized by a wistful preoccupation with the past, and with regret for not having grasped that which is now immediately passed when it was present."
"Oh..." Bicker said thoughtfully.
"It's just that I was thinking about this past summer," Melancholy went on. "It was such a great time. Remember riding in that big Packard station wagon up to the lake with the girls, and swimming and sunbathing all day, and grilling up a feast every night? It just occurs to me that there isn't much time left in which to be that young and carefree again, and that we're all moving inexorably toward the closed-off outcomes of a future we embrace only unwillingly - a future, of course, that reaches its terminus at physical extinction."
They parted, without speaking another word.
From that humble beginning, melancholy - occasionally written as melancholia, to give it the veneer of continental sophistication - spread like wildfire across the country. In November 1962, the record "My Melancholy Baby" by Chet McQuint And The Sorrowful Widowers topped the pop charts for three straight weeks.
In 1965, at the height of Great Society optimism, Congress presented Greg Melancholy with an award for inventing a new emotion, and also ruled that "Chet Baker Sings" should be the national standard for albums to listen to while melancholy.
A beaming recipient told reporters, "I'm Melancholy in name only today!" to appreciative chuckles.
Melancholy - called by Vanity Fair "the emotion of the 1960s, the one that everyone from coeds to Princess Lee Radziwill simply has to have" - fell into disrepute in the early 1970s, though, when it emerged that the U.S. military had secretly experimented with possible applications of melancholy in psychological warfare.
Although initial attempts to induce melancholy in unwitting U.S. soldiers had resulted in only vague feelings of ennui, Operation Sad Look Back had more success in Southeast Asia - too much success, in fact.
Seeking to destabilize pro-Communist factions within the royal court of Cambodia, the U.S. government spread melancholy-causing agents throughout the country. Instead of a sad sack population of nostalgic people, though, this experiment resulted in the psychotically depressed Khmer Rouge.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order #2314, in which he pledged never again would the United States tamper with the feelings of foreign countries.
Eight years later, though, congressional investigations into the Reagan administration's secret Central American policies revealed that not only had the CIA sought to make Nicaraguans melancholy, but also to invest them with feelings of grief, unreasonable jubilation, and giddiness at puppets.
2. Lewton Morris
What Dag Hammerskjold once characterized as "the atomic bomb of swear words" was never uttered by human lips until May 19, 1947.
On that day, the Wellton High School Drama Club was running through a dress rehearsal of Oedipus The King, due to debut that night. Oedipus was played by Randall Husk, by all accounts a vain and egotistical boy (and, according to the Wellton Daily Courier's reviewer, a "pallid and wan Oedipus, sighing before Destiny rather than meeting her head-on"). Lewton Morris, a slow-witted but kindhearted boy who majored in shop, was in the production in the role of some rocks.
As they ran through the production, Husk began viciously upbraiding Helen Grady, who was playing Jocasta. Morris was desperately in love with Grady, although he had never felt able to make his affections known. On this night, though, he had simply had enough both of Husk's bullying and the humiliation of his beloved.
Stepping forward from his position at the side of the stage, Morris started to tell Husk to stop, but tripped on his rock costume and tumbled forward, falling face first onto the stage.
Of course everyone laughed - everyone except Grady, who rushed to Morris' side - and no one laughed harder than Husk. That mirth turned to stunned silence as Morris, humiliated and grasping for words, opened forth a torrent of obscenity:
"You - fuck - fuck you - fuck - fuck yourself - fucker - you fuck your mother - you like to fuck - you are a - you MOTHERFUCKER" - he stammered, according to his autobiography, I Swear To God.
At that time, of course, using the word "fuck" in public was synonymous with Communism, and Morris was quickly sentenced to death. His appeal led to the landmark Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Foul-mouthed Red, which reaffirmed Americans' inalienable right to swear as much as they liked whenever they liked. The first use of the "f-word" on national television came shortly thereafter, when I Love Lucy's Ricky Ricardo called his wife "a whiny fucking cunt."
Morris and Grady married in 1950 and are still together, although they now reside in a retirement community in Arizona, where they are frequently visited by their many children and grandchildren. Ironically, Morris today professes to be horrified by rap music, which he calls "filthy."
3. Publius Severus
Although chickens had been kept as livestock for centuries, until Severus' time they were used largely to clean away organic debris in temples, to rouse the legions from slumber at daybreak, and, occasionally, to cast decisive votes in the senate regarding matters of key international policy.
Working on a hunch which he picked up when watching a fox eat a chicken while emitting sounds like "Mmmm" and "Oh, that's divine," Severus one night killed a local chicken by running it over with a chariot. He then grilled and ate it, with Plutarch recording that Severus pronounced it "delicious, with the addition of spices and sauce," although many historians reject this as a later interpolation.
Tragically for this gustatory pioneer, under an obscure Etruscan law, the chicken was technically a god, by virtue of having been present at the birth of a famous mathematician. Publius Severus was arrested, tried, and executed in a manner best left to the imagination.
4. Tom Edison
Very little is known about this obscure late 19th century New Jersey resident, who is credited by experts with contributing to breakthroughs in the invention of the long-lasting light bulb, the phonograph, and hovering. In fact, so obscure was "the Hermit of Menlo Park" that not a single photograph showing him is known to exist. Based on fragmentary accounts by his milkman, here is the best we can guess as to how this elusive genius actually looked:
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