Doubtless you're all familiar with Bill Nye The Science Guy, the PBS television host who's show was "known for its quirky humor and rapid-fire MTV-style pacing". While his moniker served to brand him as a very specific type of lovable nerd, it also helped to differentiate him from the original Bill Nye. That's right, the Bill Nye you know and love is not the first!

Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye was an American humorist author living in Wyoming in the late 1800s. He founded and edited The Laramie Boomerang. The newspaper was named after his mule, Boomerang, named such "because he could trust the mule to return him home no matter how inebriated and disoriented Nye might become." After the newspaper, he wrote a couple books with the famed writer/poet James Whitcomb Riley, as well as a fair number of satire books on his own.

The most famous Nye title is inarguably Bill Nye's Comic History of the United States which is still worth a read even today.