Q.
Have you been surprised by the hobby confessions of some of your nearest and dearest? Which hobbies inspired historical figures?

.

A.

One person’s hobby is another person’s crime scene. You collect what from where?

Then there are those people whose surprising hobbies – is that a welder? – just reinforce how unpredictably talented they are.

Here’s how some renowned people of the past whiled away their hours:

.

.

A Sampling of Famous Hobbies

• Winston Churchill – painting
• Marie Curie – bicycling
• Emily Dickinson – baking
• Thomas Edison – watching silent movies
• Albert Einstein – the violin + sailing (albeit not so successfully as a non-swimmer)
• Duke Ellington – painting
• Sigmund Freud – hiking and mushroom-picking
• Thomas Jefferson – multiple including chess, the violin, archeology …
• Steve Jobs – the guitar
• Stanley Kubrick – collecting stationary and brown ink
• Felix Mendelssohn – drawing, painting, learning new languages
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – card tricks + games like bowling, billiards
.

.

• Vladimir Nabakov – lepidopterist – moths and butterflies
• Napoleon – playing chess
• Nostradamus – jam making
• Georgia O’Keefe – camping
• Prince – table tennis
• Teddy Roosevelt – boxing and judo
• Frank Sinatra – model trains, painting
• Jimmy Stewart – aviation
• J.R.R. Tolkein – glossopoeia, ie: inventing new languages
• Mark Twain – patented suspenders, that is ‘Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments’
• Edith Wharton – interior decoration
• The Wright Brothers – cycling

.

www.justcurious.ca

Header: Benjamin Lehman