wait do you guys know about Adolphe Sax
The first thing to know about this guy is that he almost died like, A LOT. so much so that his nickname as a child was "little sax, the ghost" (super creative ik but also someone pls start calling me this sjskshekih) Here is a short list of a couple things that have almost killed him, in no particular order:
drank sulfuric acid thinking it was milk
got hit in the head by a cobblestone
fell in a river and almost drowned
almost asphyxiated bc he fell asleep in a room where furniture varnish was drying
drank a concoction of white lead, copper oxide, and arsenic (yum)
swallowed a needle (that miraculously passed without puncturing his insides)
fell out a three story window
and, my personal favorite, bc what the actual fuck
fell onto a super hot skillet and really burned his face
Later in life, he would invent the saxhorn, saxtromba, and saxtuba, and of course, the Saxophone (all of which stemmed from when, as a child, he would mess around with clarinets in order to "make them sound better". ha roasted.)
he waited 2 years to get the patent for the saxophone bc he was afraid that someone had already invented it better, and he didn't want to plagiarize.
the funny thing is about his later life, is that people fucking hated him. like clubs-formed-for-the-specific-reason-of-not-liking-him hated him. like news-papers-published-articles-talking-about-how-much-they-disliked-him hated him. the worst part is that the saxophone didn't even become big in the music scene when he was alive (in France in the 1840s). in fact, there's a rumor that, during the debut of the saxophone, a competitor hated him so much that he actually kicked the saxophone and therefore prevented Adolphe from getting an award for it.
anyway. i just thought all this was fun because all these articles i read kept calling him a badass, when my main take away was that god, or some other cosmic entity really did not want the saxophone to exist.
and he did it anyway, the madlad
