Lewis Latimer was born in 1848 to a father who’d escaped slavery in a case that became a national cause. With only a few years of schooling and a stint in the Union Navy behind him, he taught himself mechanical drafting from the ground up while working as an office boy at a patent firm — and became good enough to prepare the patent drawings for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. He then patented a better process for manufacturing the carbon filaments inside light bulbs, helping bring durable, affordable electric light to streets and homes, before Edison himself hired him as a chief draftsman and patent expert. He wrote an early textbook on electric lighting and became the only Black member of the Edison Pioneers.

• The fugitive-slave case that shadowed his birth
• How he taught himself drafting by watching over draftsmen’s shoulders
• Why two of history’s most famous inventions quietly run through one overlooked man’s hand

Born Elizabeth Cochran, “Nellie Bly” muscled her way into journalism and landed at Pulitzer’s New York World — which handed her a terrifying assignment: fake insanity, get committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, and report what really went on. She found rancid food, freezing baths, cruelty, and women no more insane than she was, trapped with no way to prove their sanity. Her exposé, Ten Days in a Mad-House, triggered a grand jury investigation and sweeping reforms. Two years later she raced around the world alone, beating the fictional record from Jules Verne’s novel in just over 72 days.

• How the “experts” declared a perfectly healthy woman “positively demented”
• The chilling catch: the more normally she behaved inside, the crazier they insisted she was
• From asylum reformer to record-setting globe-trotter to WWI war correspondent