A fascinating tale of a true hacker ... the mechanical engineering equivalent of a cryptanalyst.

I first came across John Coster-Mullen’s name in January of 2004, after I attended an exhibit by the artist Jim Sanborn (*, *, *, *, *, *, *, *), at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC.

Coster-Mullen’s research project can be construed as a danger to mankind or as a useless antiquarian endeavor. As maddening as his personality can be, it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest. A corollary of this insight, of course, is that much of what we think we know is wrong.