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He is most known for his pioneering work on developing the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell’s interest in transmitting speech led him to experimenting with communication and medical research. He also worked on techniques to teach speech to deaf people and worked with Helen Keller among others. In addition to being an inventor and scientist, Bell was a founding member of the National Geographic Society and was president of the institution for eight years.

The entrepreneur and self-made millionaire from the 19th century Marshall Field, is perhaps best known for creating the modern department store as we now know it. He helped turn Chicago from a small town into a major city and his single store turned into a large chain. The famous London-based department store, Selfridges, was founded and led by a former employee of Marshall Field’s after working under him for 25 years. Field has much to teach us about success.

Soon after returning to Venice, Marco Polo was captured during a sea battle with the Republic of Genoa. In jail at the age of 44, he began to recount his tales to a cellmate. Polo detailed his epic journey across Asia and his stories and adventures from his time as a personal aid to Kublai Khan, the Emperor of China. The resulting book became an inspiration to many other subsequent explorers. There is much to learn from the observations, behaviour and perceptions from the travels of Marco Polo.

Today, I’ll be reviewing Scott Berkun’s latest book, The Dance of the Possible, showing you how to foster your creativity, be more productive and inspire you to get up and make stuff.

In this video, I’ll ask you three questions from Hans Rosling’s ignorance test to see if you are smarter than a chimpanzee.

P.T. Barnum was an incredibly successful promoter and showman. He created and ran a travelling circus that was known as “The Greatest Show On Earth”. He was aware of the public’s obsession for the whacky, weird and outrageous and he exploited this by exaggerating and even making up his acts. These included a woman allegedly 161 years old and a real live mermaid (which was actually a monkey wearing a fish tail).

Gustave Le Bon was an expert in many different subjects from Medicine to Psychology to Physics. He is best known for his book, The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind, which explained crowd psychology and why people behave differently in groups.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay is a study on crowd psychology and is extremely relevant to the present day, despite being written back in 1841. It explores how easily we can be misled and how illogically we can think when popular opinion influences us.

Did you know YouTube was created by three former PayPal employees and was originally a dating site? YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The logo, website domain and trademark for YouTube were registered on 14th February 2005, with the original idea for it to be an online dating website. Users would be able to upload videos of them introducing themselves and saying what they were interested in, but the idea didn’t take off and the co-founders soon pivoted to become a more general video sharing site.

From a hobby in 2004 to over 1.8 billion monthly active users, here’s the story of Facebook. While he was at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg built websites as a hobby. He built Facemash, which allowed his classmates to rate students as attractive or not. He also helped friends with another site called HarvardConnection. His friends eventually sued Zuckerberg, claiming he stole their idea for the creation of Facebook.