On May 22, 1859, a baby was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family that struggled with money. His name was Arthur Conan Doyle, and he would grow up to become a doctor - and then accidentally invent the world's most famous detective. As a young physician with a slow medical practice, Conan Doyle sat in his empty office between patients and scribbled stories to make a little extra cash.
One day he started writing about a thin, sharp-eyed man with a magnifying glass, a pipe, and a habit of solving impossible mysteries by paying attention to tiny details. He based the character on a real-life professor from his medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell, who could glance at a patient and guess their job, hometown, and recent travels just from a smudge of mud on their boots. Conan Doyle named the character Sherlock Holmes and gave him a loyal friend named Dr. John Watson. The first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887.
Readers went absolutely crazy for Holmes. The stories ran in a magazine called The Strand, and people lined up to buy each new issue. When Conan Doyle tried to kill off Holmes by sending him over a waterfall in 1893, fans were so furious they wore black armbands and wrote angry letters. He eventually brought the detective back. Conan Doyle wrote 60 Holmes adventures in all, and the character has since starred in hundreds of movies, TV shows, and books - from old black-and-white films to modern series like Sherlock. Doyle also wrote historical novels and even adventures with dinosaurs, but it's the detective at 221B Baker Street the world remembers most.
