Inventors

Les Paul, a guitar legend and music innovator, died in 2009 at the age of 94. To mark what would have been his 100th birthday, we'll listen back to a conversation he had with Terry Gross in 1992.

Waging Heavy Peace is about his music, raising two sons with special needs, and his own medical conditions, which have included polio, epilepsy and a brain aneurysm.

Inventor and ex-magician David Levy. His inventions include a tiny keypad - the size of a credit card, a tattoo whose design can be changed at will, and a devise that seals severed arteries in one minute. In 1996, at MIT, he won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which acknowledged him as one of the nation's premier young inventors.

The inventor has been called "the greatest marketer/salesman of the television era." Popeil sold everything from the Veg-O-Matic to the Pocket Fisherman on television, amassing over one billion dollars in sales. He's written a book about how he did it, "Ron Popeil: The Salesman of the Century." (REBROADCAST from 2/7/96)

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new book by Mona Simpson, about a troubled family living on a commune.

Inventor and the man called "the greatest marketer/salesman of the television era," Ron Popeil. He's sold everything from the Veg-O-Matic to the Pocket Fisherman on television, amassing over one billion dollars in sales. He's written a new book about how he did it, Ron Popeil: The Salesman of the Century, (Delacorte Press, with Jefferson Graham).