Yet another reason to haunt those antique stores and garage sales - you might find the specimen collection of Alfred Russel Wallace, the man who discovered the theory of evolution at the same time as Charles Darwin:

It was in 1979, in an antiques shop in Arlington, that a young law school graduate named Robert Heggestad noticed a lovely rosewood cabinet parked behind the counter. How much? Six hundred, the shopkeeper said. Sold, Heggestad said. The shopkeeper asked, "Don't you want to know what's in it?" Heggestad said, "Not really."

It was, it turned out, a cabinet of wonders. It is now in Heggestad's dining room in his apartment in the Kalorama section of Washington. Open up the cabinet, and the world of 2009 vanishes, replaced by the world of a very meticulous, extraordinarily curious 19th-century naturalist.

This story is the kind of thing that gives me hope in so many ways, for so many reasons. I hope a movie about Mikhail Puchkov gets made. (link via boing boing).

Submarines inspire both fear and awe. Simultaneously, they represent freedom and the lack thereof, as the ability to explore mysterious environments is curtailed by the very real potential of being trapped below the surface and slowly running out of air. Meet 40-year-old Mikhail Puchkov, who decided to design and build a personal submarine during the stifling era of Leonid Brezhnev's regime when he was barely twenty years old. He built it secretly in an attic in Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow. According to new sources, this tiny sub, which took about three years to make, provided an escape for this man who sought his creative freedom in the dead of night as he paddled quietly down the local river.

In his own words: “I was not satisfied with the fate that was laid out for me. I wanted to satisfy myself and to have some respect for my life. If I learned to respect myself, I felt it would be easier to find my niche in life. I didn't know it would work. I just hoped.”

Although his family doesn't sound like it was particularly supportive (at least his father wasn't), I think it is awesome how Puchkov hung in there. (Something Wallace could certainly understand and respect.) What I didn't realize is that Puchkov is not alone in Russia - they actually have a name for inventors like him:

This Russian inventor spent twenty years of his life attempting to realize his dream of making his submarine legal. His creative drive alone sustained him all the years he plugged away at a monotonous, dream-crushing factory job. The Russians call men like Puchkov and their whimsical inventions kulibins. The name comes from an 18th century mechanical engineer named Ivan Kulibin, who designed dozens of devices, both practical and whimsical, few of which were manufactured. He died in dire poverty at the age of 83. Kulibins may be quixotic, but they represent the stuff that dreams are made of for those in the new Russia who dare to hope for a better life and a better world.

[Post pic of Mikhail Puchkov bringing his boat home.]