An iron bar more than three feet long shot straight through his skull. Minutes later, he was sitting up and talking. September 13, 1848. Cavendish, Vermont. Phineas Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew blasting rock for a new railroad, the best man on the line, his bosses said. His job was to pack black powder into a drilled hole with a tamping iron: 3 feet 7 inches long, 13¼ pounds, tapered to a point like a javelin. That afternoon he glanced over his shoulder and opened his mouth to speak. The iron struck a spark. The powder exploded. The rod went in under his left cheekbone, passed behind his eye, tore through the front of his brain and flew out the top of his head. It landed about 80 feet away. He fell. Within minutes, he was talking. His men drove him into town in a cart. He sat up the whole way. When the doctor arrived, Gage greeted him: "Doctor, here is business enough for you." Infection nearly killed him. His family had a coffin ready. Dr. John Harlow fought for weeks, and Gage pulled through, blind in his left eye. But his friends said he was "no longer Gage." The steady foreman had turned impatient, profane and impulsive. His railroad job was gone. For a time he was a living exhibit at P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York. Then, in 1852, he moved to Chile and spent about seven years driving six-horse stagecoaches between Valparaíso and Santiago. A doctor who knew him there saw "no impairment whatever of his mental faculties." He died in San Francisco in 1860, after a series of seizures. Today his skull and his iron sit side by side at Harvard. He taught the world that the brain shapes who we are. His second act showed that people can rebuild. Disclaimer: Accounts differ on how much his personality changed and for how long; later research suggests many changes were temporary. Details and quotes come mainly from Dr. Harlow's reports of 1848 and 1868. His skull and iron are at Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum. Photos: unknown photographer, Phineas Gage with his tamping iron, c. 1850 (public domain); That Coptic Guy, Warren Anatomical Museum display (CC BY 4.0); William England, Barnum's American Museum, 1858 (public domain); Captain-tucker, Concord stagecoach (CC BY-SA 3.0); via Wikimedia Commons