Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   9

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224
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
✖  ✖  ✖
ORVILLE REDENBACHER
 — A member of a legal fraternity 
(Alpha Gamma Rho), it must have taken Redenbacher de-
cades to put his rowdy frat days behind him (those legal fra-
ternities party 
hard
), because he didn’t fi nd success as a 
popcorn innovator until he was in his 60s. Redenbacher, inci-
dentally, single-handedly created the subspecies of corn he 
bred for popability. As for some other great creators . . .
04
Creationists: 
People Who Invented Th
 eir Genre
Th
  espis of Icaria created the one-man show while simultane-
ously creating the entire art form of acting when, in 534 or 535 
BCE  he  jumped  up  onto  his  wooden  cart  and,  instead  of  just 
telling a story, he pretended he 
was a character in the story. 
No one had ever thought to tell 
this particular kind of lie be-
fore, and it was a huge hit. 
Th
  espis became the most pop-
ular traveling bard in Greece, 
and the innovations of acting, 
costumes, masks, and makeup 
(all attributed to Th
 espis) 
spread throughout the empire.
✖  ✖  ✖
Back in 1952, 
Astro Boy
 
(
Tetsuwan Atomu
 to the Japa-
nese) fi rst hit shelves of comic 
bookstores, offi
  cially launch-
ing the genre of robots, shiny 
Unraveling the 
Mystery of the 
Mystery
At the top of a long list of writ-
ers widely suspected to have 
invented the detective novel are 
Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur 
Conan Doyle. However, the ac-
tual culprits were one Edgar Al-
lan Poe, famous for explora-
tions of death, and the now 
obscure (though once wildly 
popular) author, Wilkie Collins. 

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225
boots, and large heads known 
collectively  as  Japanese  ani-
mation  or  anime.  Th
 e artist 
and writer behind 
Astro Boy,
 
Osamu Tezuka, is known as 
the “god-king of 
manga,
” 
(
manga
 being Japanese comic 
books) and the father of an-
ime. In his lifetime, he drew 
over 170,000 pages of comics.
✖  ✖  ✖
While everyone knows Isaac 
Newton created classical me-
chanics,  the  system  of  laws 
governing physical bodies 
that’s also known as Newto-
nian physics, not everyone is 
aware that the most infl uen-
tial scientist in history was 
also responsible for the cat 
fl ap.  Th
 at’s right! Th
 at little 
fl ap  on  your  door  that  lets 
Kitty in and out without your 
having to lift a thumb comes 
straight  from  the  mind  of  Sir 
Isaac. While the cat fl ap  has 
lasted  with  relatively  little 
change, Newtonian physics re-
mained the only genre of phys-
ics for several hundred years, 
until Einstein, Planck, Bohr, 
Heisenberg, and a band of sci-
entists  proved  that  many  of 
Poe set the stage with three nov-
els in which his hero, Auguste 
Dupin, follows convoluted trails 
to the truth using logic and as-
tute observation. And while that 
proved a good start, the genre 
of detective fi ction didn’t truly 
emerge until Wilkie Collins in-
troduced archetypes such as 
the inept police force, the cele-
brated private investigator, the 
reconstruction of the crime, and 
the fi nal plot twist in his 1860 
novel 
The Woman in White.
 
The truth is Wilkie had mastered 
the genre over 15 years before 
the fi rst Sherlock Holmes novel 
was even published.
Stealing Simba
Before his death in 1989, Tezuka 
said that the large-eyes style of 
Japanese drawing actually origi-
nated from American cartoons 
such  as  Walt  Disney’s  Mickey 
Mouse. The trade of ideas runs 
both ways apparently, as Disney 
writers  seem  to  have  pulled 
many of the characters and situ-
ations in the movie 
The Lion King
 
directly from Osamu Tezuka’s 
manga
 (and full-length animated 
movie) 
Kimba the White Lion.