inventor

Les Paul, the inventor and musician who built the first solid body electric guitar and recorded the first multi-track song, died on Thursday due to complications from pneumonia. Popular music's Thomas Edison, Les Paul's technological innovations drastically altered the face of music and culture. He was 94.

Sad news: John Kanzius, the Florida-based inventor whose cancer-curing machine we awarded a PopSci Invention Award last year, passed away last Wednesday. Kanzius was a true PopSci guy: A former radio engineer who, upon being diagnosed with leukemia, figured there had to be a better way to deal with it than his crippling chemo treatments. So he pulled out his wife’s pie pans and started tinkering, ultimately creating a machine that would have great success in animal trials using radio waves and carbon nanotubes to burn away cancer cells. He was even profiled on “60 Minutes.”

This rocket car shot along at 90 miles an hour on a different sort of alternative fuel: liquid oxygen. The driver ended up being killed in an explosion at a later trial, but its inventor insisted that the successful first run proved "the scientific possibility of driving vehicles this way."

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