had to sell licenses abroad to meet the vast demand for his inventions.

Inventor of 21 different types of automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, military vehicles, ambulances and bicycles at the dawn of the automotive era, Johann Puch (1862-1914) was vehicle manufacturer to the Austro-Hungarian Imperial family, and holder of 35 patents. A museum of his inventions can be visited in Graz, Austria, and he has even been featured on a postage stamp.

You’d be unlikely to find a more cinematic life story than that of Peter Florjančič (born 1919). Aged 16, he was the youngest ever Slovenian Olympian, competing on the ski team in the 1936 Olympics. When the Nazis occupied the territory around his native Bled, Slovenia in 1943, and obliged him to join their army, he decided instead tofake his own death, during a ski trip to Kitzbuehel, Austria, and then ski his way over to Switzerland, in a winter Olympics version of The Sound of Music. He was held in an internment camp in Switzerland, where he passed his time fruitfully inventing a type of loom that could be operated by disabled soldiers. His career as an inventor started in earnest in Monte Carlo, where he conceived the perfume atomizer. Also to his credit are plastic ice skates, plastic photograph slide frames, plastic zippers and airbags. His 2007 autobiography is certainly a rousing read. Aged 97, he is still alive and well.

One of the theoretical pioneers of space travel, Herman Potočnik (1892-1929), who went by the pseudonym Noordung, published a treatise on how humans could