This is the true story behind SpongeBob. He wasn’t a cartoon character. He was a solitary man obsessed with a dangerous idea. In 1843, a man named Robert Spence isolated himself in an abandoned lighthouse off the coast of Maine. The locals nicknamed him SpongeBob. He collected sea sponges from shipwrecks and sold them to sailors who passed by. For years, he almost never returned to land. He mailed letters detailing strange experiments meant to purify seawater and give life to the ocean itself. T