Thirteenth-century professor Thaddeus of Bologna once claimed anyone who ate eggplant for nine days would go insane. A student decided to test the theory and after nine days returned to report he was not mad. Thaddeus asked him to turn around; on observing the student’s behind he announced, “All this about the eggplant has been proved.” It is said the student subsequently wrote a learned treatise on the subject.

Students at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich wrote to Carl Jung in 1949 to ask what effect he thought technology had on the human psyche. “The danger lies not in technology,” Jung responded, “but in the possibilities awaiting discovery.” The question regarding new discoveries was “whether man is sufficiently equipped with reason to be able to resist the temptation to use them for destructive purposes.” This, Jung concluded, “experience alone can answer.”

Before Sally Ride spent a week aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1983 and became the first American woman in space, NASA engineers asked her if she wanted a hundred tampons in her flight kit. “No,” she later recalled responding, “that would not be the right number.” They said they wanted to be safe. “Well,” she assured them, “you can cut that in half with no problem at all.”

Members inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 included Yvonne Brill, whose electrothermal hydrazine thruster keeps satellites in space orbit, as well as Arthur Fry and Steven Silver, who created sticky notes (Fry, the concept; Silver, the glue). “Note: It took one woman to invent a rocket thruster,” wrote a Washington Post reporter about the induction ceremony, “and two men to invent Post-its.”