Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

Eustace was not just an engineer. A trim, straight-backed man who wore rimless glasses, he was also a pilot, skydiver, and all-around thrill seeker who choreographed each new thrill with the same cold rationality he applied to building a computer chip. He would soon set a world record when he donned a pressure suit and jumped from a balloon floating in the stratosphere,1 twenty-five miles above the Earth. Just recently, he and several other skydivers had parachuted from a Gulfstream jet—something no one else had ever done—and this gave him an idea. Before any of them could make the leap, someone had to open the door at the back of the plane, and just to make sure they didn’t go tumbling into the great beyond before they were ready for the jump, they wore full-body mountain-climbing harnesses rigged with two long black straps that hooked into metal rings on the inside walls of the plane. If Google rented a private jet, Eustace decided, they could put a harness on Hinton, lay him on a bed secured to the floor, and hook him into the jet in much the same way. And that’s what they did. They took off for London in a private Gulfstream with Hinton lying on two seats folded flat into a makeshift bed, two taught straps holding him in place. “Everyone was pleased with me,” Hinton says. “It meant they could fly on the private jet, too.”