Alexander Graham Bell had it right from the beginning. "Mr. Watson," he called to his assistant through the first working telephone, "come here—I want to see you." Fifty years later, the first television transmission made his words literal. And now, 130 years later, the pieces are falling into place to finally let us all be seen.

The papers Einstein wrote in 1905 covered a broad swath—special relativity, electrodynamics, Brownian motion, light quanta. Churned out in less than a year, these ideas had lasting impact: scientists today still devote their lives to evaluating Einstein’s work on gravity, space and time. Einstein isn’t the only scientist, however, to pull off such compacted productivity. Newton, Galileo and others had their own superproductive 12-month stretches—but as far as we can tell, no post-Einstein scientist has managed one. Why? Read on.

Galileo Galilei: 1609-1610

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone here. Bill Gates studied here (before dropping out). The sewing machine, vulcanized rubber, the Polaroid camera, the microwave oven, artificial limbs, synthetic penicillin, the first computers, Arpanet, e-mail, inertial guidance systems—all are products of Boston ingenuity. Not so surprising when you consider that the city boasts more than 60 colleges and universities.