In 1859 an American farmer shot a British pig rooting in his potato patch. Within weeks, hundreds of soldiers, a fleet of warships, and 2,000 sailors faced off on a foggy little island – and the only casualty was the pig.
In 1859 a ruined San Francisco businessman walked into a newspaper office and declared himself Emperor of the United States. For twenty-one years a whole city played along – and when he died, tens of thousands came to mourn their emperor.
He could have been one of the richest men in the world. Instead Wilhelm Röntgen refused to patent the X-ray, gave away his Nobel Prize money, and died nearly broke. The story of the shy physicist who handed the world a miracle and asked for nothing back.
On the night of October 8, 1871, the sky over a small Wisconsin lumber town turned to fire. In little more than an hour, a firestorm hot enough to boil a river dry killed more people than any wildfire in American history. And almost no one remembers it, because 250 miles south, Chicago was burning too.
