Trevorrow's independent comedy, Safety Not Guaranteed, featuring Mark Duplass as an eccentricinventor who is seeking to travel back in time, was shown at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
The boldest advance came in the 17th-century, when Henry Winstanley, an eccentricinventor and practical joker (he had chairs in his house that flew up in the air), took it upon himself to build a lighthouse on the lethal Eddystone Rock, 14 miles from the English port of Plymouth.
About the time Henry Ford built his first car, the quadricycle, in 1896, eccentric Japanese inventor Sakichi Toyoda, 29, invented his first--weaving loom.