The son of a blacksmith, Michael Faraday left school young and became a bookbinder's apprentice, devouring the books he bound. With no mathematical training, he discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, the principle behind generators and transformers. He pictured "lines of force" around magnets; James Clerk Maxwell later turned those intuitions into famous equations.
Cooled below −183 °C, oxygen turns into a pale blue liquid. Pour it between the poles of a strong magnet and, instead of flowing away, it hangs suspended between them. The reason lies in its unpaired electrons, which respond to the magnetic field. Liquid nitrogen, by contrast, is colourless and pours straight through.
In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a capsule hanging beneath a balloon, about 39 kilometres up. In that extremely thin air almost nothing slowed him down, and he reached around 1,358 km/h in free fall, or Mach 1.25. He became the first person to exceed the speed of sound with nothing but his own body.