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The Underappreciated Nikola Tesla, and Other Under-Recognized Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan January 12, 2020 32 min

Nikola Tesla - A New System of Alternating Current Motors and Transformers — Nikola Tesla. Pintrest

8. Money Makes Many Things Possible

One of Frances Glessner Lee’s crime scene dioramas. New York Times

Frances Glessner Lee eschewed splurging her inherited fortune on lavish parties for debutants, tycoons, and other society types. Instead, she made a sizeable endowment to the recently established Harvard Department of Legal Medicine – the country’s first such institution. In addition to her financial generosity, Lee hosted week-long seminars for homicide detectives, prosecutors, and other investigators, to train them on crime investigation techniques.

Her methodology, Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths, consisted of 20 true crime scene dioramas, that she personally reproduced in painstaking detail on a dollhouse scale. Her dioramas were complete with working doors, windows, lights, and minute details all the way down to tiny food cans and miniature mousetraps. Students were given 90 minutes to study the scene, then try and solve the crime based on their observations. For her efforts, she was made an honorary captain in the New Hampshire State Police. 18 of her dioramas are still in use for training purposes.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.