is said to have shrieked, "I have seen my death!" All entrepreneurs have to deal with risk, but for most of them it's about capital risk, market risk, and execution riskR

But the in-law entrepreneurs who founded the chain in the 1940s also turned the franchising model into a veritable military operation: Baskin-Robbins was among the first food companies to offer shopowners standardized products created at a central location.

Irv Robbins's son John, who turned his back on running the family business partly because of what he saw as the negative effects of mass-produced ice cream on both humans and cows, attributed the untimely death to the very product Baskin created: "He was a very big man," Robbins once said, "who ate a lot of ice cream.".

His company, Advanced Vehicle Engineers, created the Mizar by grafting the wings and tail of a Cessna onto what is perhaps the most unsightly car ever produced: the Pinto.

In 2009, Heselden, then one of England's richest men (and among its most generous philanthropists), bought the Segway company, started by entrepreneur Dean Kamen.

In 1914, a young chemical scientist turned businessman had what seemed like a bright idea: Paint the hands of a clock with radium, Sabin Arnold von Sochocky posited, and you could tell the time even when the lights were off.

In 1917, von Sochocky's company, the United States Radium Corporation (founded with George Willis), introduced Undark, a radio­luminescent paint.

There was just one itsy-bitsy, blink-and-you'll-miss-it problem: Radium, it turned out, causes cancer.

Like a good entrepreneur, Bullock kept ideating and went on to design a seed planter, a hay and cotton press, and a slightly famous grain drill.