MentorMinds
He finished remarkably little and left about seven thousand pages of notes — written backwards — on everything from bird flight to the muscles of the human face.
A runaway printer’s apprentice who founded a library, a fire company and a university — and refused to patent a single one of his inventions.
Three months of schooling, 1,093 patents — and the invention that mattered most was the invention factory itself.
He imagined complete machines in his head, powered the modern world — and died broke, decades ahead of schedule.