When a Vegas hotel tried to kick him out, he bought the place.
Faced with a huge tax bill in California, he decided to move to Las Vegas in late 1966, arriving by private train car and taking up residence on the top floor of the Desert Inn. When the hotel’s owner tried to evict Hughes and his staff, who didn’t gamble, in order to free up rooms for high-roller guests, Hughes decided to buy the place (technically, he purchased a long-term lease), for $13 million. Afterward, he went on a Vegas buying spree, snapping up other hotel-casinos, an airport and airline and various tracts of undeveloped land. Also, because Hughes, by then a recluse who never left his Desert Inn penthouse, wanted to watch his favorite old movies on late-night TV—and the city had no all-night stations–he acquired a local TV station of his own.
After four years in Vegas, during which time he became one of Nevada’s biggest employers and private landholders, he left abruptly in 1970. He spent the final six years of his life living in hotels in the Bahamas, Nicaragua, Vancouver, London and Acapulco.
Hughes was part of a CIA plot to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. In March 1968, during the Cold War, a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear-armed ballistic missiles accidentally sank in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviets embarked on a two-month search for the sub but were unable to locate it; not long afterward, the U.S. found it some 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii, 16,500 feet below the water’s surface. Believing the 1,750-ton sub was a source of important intelligence information, the CIA launched a complex covert operation, codenamed Project Azorian, to recover it. The U.S. commissioned the construction of a ship with the specialized capabilities needed to lift the sub from the ocean’s depths, and the CIA devised a cover story that the vessel, named the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was being built for Howard Hughes, who planned to use it for a new commercial venture: mining minerals from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Explorer finally arrived at the wreckage site in the summer of 1974 but was unable to retrieve the whole sub because a portion broke off as it was being raised. A second recovery effort was planned; however, in the meantime there was a burglary at the Los Angeles headquarters of Hughes’ Summa Corporation, and among the stolen items was thought to be a secret document linking Howard Hughes to the CIA and the Glomar Explorer. The news media learned about the burglary and the story of the Glomar Explorer’s real purpose became public in 1975. As a result, the mission to recover the rest of the sub was scrapped.
His famous Spruce Goose aircraft was flown only once.
In 1942, during World War II, Hughes contracted with the U.S. government to design and build an aircraft capable of transporting 700 troops or a load of 60 tons across the Atlantic. Known by various names, including the H-4 Hercules, the Flying Boat and most commonly, the Spruce Goose (a moniker Hughes detested), it had a wingspan of 320 feet and was the largest aircraft ever constructed. However, the war ended before the plane was completed, and in 1947 Hughes was called to testify before a U.S. Senate committee investigating whether he’d misused millions of dollars in government funds on the project. At the hearings, Hughes said of the Spruce Goose: “I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.”
After testifying in Washington, Hughes was determined to show his massive aircraft could fly, and on November 2, 1947, he piloted its first and only flight. The Spruce Goose (the nickname came from the fact it was constructed of wood due to wartime restrictions on steel and aluminum; however, birch, not spruce, was the primary building material) traveled for a mile about 70 feet above the water at Long Beach, California, before landing. Members of the Senate committee later issued a report criticizing Hughes’ handling of the Spruce Goose project but the document proved inconsequential. After the aircraft’s lone flight, Hughes shelled out millions to keep it in a climate-controlled Long Beach hangar until his 1976 death. It’s now housed at an aviation museum in Oregon.
Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Galileo didn’t invent the telescope—Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is generally credited with its creation—but he was the first person to use the optical instrument to systematically study the heavens. Lippershey’s patent application for the device in 1608 is the earliest on record; however, because the Dutch government decided the telescope was too easy to copy and because another Dutch instrument-maker had tried to patent the device a short time after Lippershey, no patent was granted. In 1609, Galileo learned about the device and developed one of his own, significantly improving its design. That fall, he pointed it at the moon and discovered it had craters and mountains, debunking the common belief that the moon’s surface was smooth.
Galileo soon went on to make other findings with his telescope, including that there were four moons orbiting Jupiter and that Venus went through a complete set of phases (indicating the planet traveled around the sun). Galileo’s discoveries brought him acclaim and in 1610 he was named the chief mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke of Tuscany as well as chief mathematician at the University of Pisa. More significantly, Galileo’s observations would lead him to support the theory, laid out in 1543 by Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the sun is the center of the universe and the Earth and other planets revolve around it.
Shortly before Hitler rose to power in 1933, Einstein left Berlin for the United States and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His support for pacifist, civil rights and left-wing causes had already drawn suspicion from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and after his arrival on American shores, the Bureau launched what would eventually become a 22-year surveillance campaign. Agents listened to the physicist’s phone calls, opened his mail and rooted through his trash in the hope of unmasking him as a subversive or a Soviet spy. They even investigated tips that he was building a death ray. The project came up empty handed, but by the time Einstein died in 1955, his FBI file totaled a whopping 1,800 pages.
Einstein died in April 1955 from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He had requested that his body be cremated, but in a bizarre incident, Princeton pathologist Thomas Harvey removed his famous brain during his autopsy and kept it in the hope of unlocking the secrets of his genius. After winning a reluctant approval from Einstein’s son, Harvey later had the brain cut into pieces and sent to various scientists for research. A handful of studies have been conduced on it since the 1980s, but most have either been dismissed or discredited. Perhaps the most famous came in 1999, when a team from a Canadian university published a controversial paper claiming Einstein possessed unusual folds on his parietal lobe, a part of the brain associated with mathematical and spatial ability.
In the late-1930s, Einstein learned that new research had put German scientists on a path toward creating the atom bomb. The prospect of a doomsday weapon in the hands of the Nazis convinced him to set aside his pacifist principles and team up with Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who helped him write a letter urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to conduct atomic research. Though Einstein never participated directly in the Manhattan Project, he later expressed deep regrets about his minor role in brining about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I never would have lifted a finger,” he told Newsweek. He went on to become an impassioned advocate of nuclear disarmament, controls on weapons testing and unified world government. Shortly before his death in 1955, he joined with philosopher Bertrand Russell in signing the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” a public letter that stressed the risks of nuclear war and implored governments to “find peaceful means for the settlement of all disputes between them.”
In 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, which stated that gravitational fields cause distortions in the fabric of space and time. Because it was such a bold rewriting of the laws of physics, the theory remained controversial until May 1919, when a total solar eclipse provided the proper conditions to test its claim that a supermassive object—in this case the sun—would cause a measurable curve in the starlight passing by it. Hoping to prove Einstein’s theory once and for all, English astronomer Arthur Eddington journeyed to the coast of West Africa and photographed the eclipse. Upon analyzing the pictures, he confirmed that the sun’s gravity had deflected the light by roughly 1.7 arc-seconds—exactly as predicted by general relativity. The news made Einstein an overnight celebrity. Newspapers hailed him as the heir to Sir Isaac Newton, and he went on to travel the world lecturing on his theories about the cosmos. According to Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson, in the six years after the 1919 eclipse, more than 600 books and articles were written about the theory of relativity.
After his marriage to Mileva Maric hit the rocks in the early 1910s, Einstein left his family, moved to Berlin and started a new relationship with his cousin, Elsa. He and Maric finally divorced several years later in 1919. As part of their separation agreement, Einstein promised her an annual stipend plus whatever money he might receive from the Nobel Prize—which he was supremely confident he would eventually win. Maric agreed, and Einstein later handed over a small fortune upon receiving the award in 1922 for his work on the photoelectric effect. By then, he had already remarried to Elsa, who remained his wife until her death in 1936.
Einstein showed flashes of brilliance during his years at the Zurich Polytechnic, but his rebellious personality and penchant for skipping classes saw his professors give him less than glowing recommendations upon his graduation in 1900. The young physicist later spent two years searching for an academic position before settling for a gig at the Swiss patent office in Bern. Though menial, the job turned out to be a perfect fit for Einstein, who found he could breeze through his office duties in a few hours and spend the rest of the day writing and conducting research. In 1905—often called his “miracle year”—the lowly clerk published four revolutionary articles that introduced his famous equation E=mc2 and the theory of special relativity. While the discoveries marked Einstein’s entrance onto the physics world stage, he didn’t win a full professorship until 1909—nearly a decade after he had left school.
