CURIOSITYYou’d Never Guess Which Famous Faces Were Also Brilliant Inventors4 min read

Marlon Brando Hated Tuning His Drums

Most people picture Marlon Brando brooding on a film set or muttering lines in a darkened studio. Fewer picture him hunched over a conga drum, cursing at a row of tension screws. But Brando was a serious percussionist — bongos and congas were genuine passions, not party tricks.

What drove him to the patent office was pure frustration. Standard congas required adjusting five or six screws to change the pitch. Brando designed a version that used a single hand crank instead. He received the patent in 2002, two years before his death. Professional drummer Poncho Sanchez tried it out and called it a cool idea — but concluded it was too impractical and expensive to produce at scale.

Mark Twain’s Genius Shortcut

Mark Twain was one of America’s sharpest minds and, apparently, one of its most impatient scrapbookers. The man who gave us Huckleberry Finn also hated the mess of applying glue to every clipping he wanted to save.

His fix was elegant: a scrapbook with pre-applied adhesive strips on every page. Dampen the strip, press the item down, done. The invention went on sale around 1877 and stayed in production for roughly 25 years. It was one of his few commercially successful ventures outside of writing — which, given how badly some of his other business investments went, was no small achievement.