Marshall Brain obit

NC State faculty member, website creator Marshall Brain dies

An North Carolina State University faculty member and creator of the popular website How Stuff Works has died. 

He was not on the list.

An North Carolina State University faculty member and creator of the popular website How Stuff Works has died.

 

Marshall Brain died inside his office Wednesday on NC State’s centennial campus.

 

While the university would not confirm any details related to his death, sources close to Brain say he died by suicide.

 

The NC State Police Department said it is no longer investigating, and foul play is not suspected.

 

Brain contributed several articles to WRAL.com over the years, including an editorial piece. He’s also author of “The Doomsday Book: The Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Threats.”

 

Brain was the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and the author of the How Stuff Works book series. He hosted the National Geographic channel's Factory Floor with Marshall Brain and Who Knew? With Marshall Brain.

He was an enthusiastic American author, public speaker, futurist, entrepreneur, and professor, who specialized in making complex topics easier to understand for the general public.

Marshall Brain was born in Santa Monica, California, where his father designed components for Moon rockets. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1983, and a M.S in computer science from North Carolina State University.

Marshall taught in the computer science department at North Carolina State University from 1986 to 1992. He also wrote computer programming manuals and ran a software training and consulting company.

In 1998, Brain founded the website HowStuffWorks.com as a hobby.  In 2002, Time magazine described HowStuffWorks.com as "an eclectic encyclopedia that covers everything from torque converters to dieting to DNA." In 2002, Brain sold a part of his related company, How Stuff Works Inc., to The Convex Group, an Atlanta-based investment company owned by former Web MD CEO Jeff Arnold, for an estimated $1 million. Discovery purchased the website for $250 million in 2007 and introduced its television show How Stuff Works in 2008.

In 2008 and 2009, he hosted Factory Floor with Marshall Brain and the Who Knew? With Marshall Brain, both on the National Geographic channel. For these shows, Brain showed viewers how products are designed, tested, and manufactured. Brain says shows like this are popular because "We use this stuff every day and some of it's so interesting. Like the science underneath it, and how people use that science to make the product and other people make it cheap enough for all of us to be able to afford it."

Brain appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Oz, Good Morning America, CNN, and Modern Marvels.

In addition to his How Stuff Works nonfiction book series, Brain wrote about robotics, transhumanism, and atheism, including his books The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches (2015) and Manna: Two Views of Humanity's Future (2012). Brain maintained that automation and robots will lead to unemployment for humans, such as 1.5 million big-rig truck drivers in the U.S. losing their jobs to self-driving cars, requiring a government guaranteed minimum income.