Geniuses take up a lot of space in our history books, but it turns out that many of them were more than a little, well, eccentric. As Katie Spalding reveals in “Edison’s Ghosts: The Untold Rarity of History’s Greatest Geniuses” (Little, Brown and Company), the mathematician Pythagoras was killed because he despised beans so much that he would not cut down a field of them, despite an angry mob chasing him. Thomas Edison tried unsuccessfully to invent a telephone for calling the dead, and Benjamin Franklin turned off electricity to his unknown dinner guests. Other weird geniuses include:
Tycho Brahé
Brahe, a 16th-century Danish astronomer and alchemist, discovered supernovae and created the most accurate star maps in the world. He too got into a drunken duel over math and ended up with a brass nose to replace the sliced-off original. He spent most of his time drinking heavily with his best friend, a mead-guzzling pet moose, who died after falling down some stairs. Brahe also died young, either from eating and drinking gold cutlery or from experiments in the laboratory; however, a 20th century autopsy revealed a large amount of gold plated on his internal organs.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Musical prodigy child or not, Mozart also insisted that his new baby be given only water for sustenance: the boy survived only because Wolfgang’s mother-in-law secretly fed him. But the musician’s greatest weakness was his love of good poop jokes. A love letter he sent to a teenage lover suggested that she “shit on her bed” and kiss her “own ass.” He kept that dirty approach all his life, though at 30 he switched from German to more fiery Latin to make his bathroom puns. One song he composed included the lyric “it’s hard to lick my ass and balls”. Mozart couldn’t help it, Spalding writes, just being in it “for shit and giggles.”
Émilie du Châtelet
Born a woman in France in the 17th century, Chatelet was supposed to do one thing: get married. But Emilie knew her worth and she challenged her father’s authority by challenging her head knight to a duel. At 17, she stripped down to her underwear and fought the warrior to a draw. That allowed Emilie to do what she wanted: study math and science. She became the first woman published by the Paris Academy of Sciences and wrote a groundbreaking translation of a tome by Isaac Newton.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Militarily, the great European conqueror really only had one fear: rabbits. When Napoleon survived the War of the Fourth Coalition, he celebrated by taking his generals on a congratulatory hare hunt. An aide rounded up thousands of rabbits on an excursion in 1807 and released them where Bonaparte’s group awaited them. But the rabbits saw the soldiers on horseback and rushed madly towards them, and “the whole phalanx (of rabbits) rushed at Napoleon.” After initially being driven off, the rabbits regrouped and redoubled their efforts, attacking the “Emperor” from its flank and rear, forcing the “conqueror of conquerors”. . . withdraw and leave (the foolish wabbits) in possession of the field.”
sir byron
George Gordon “Lord” Byron was a 19th century British poet famous for his “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage” and “Don Juan.” The son of the infamous “Mad Jack Byron,” who left his wife for an affair with his sister, Lord Byron overcame his clubfoot sensibilities to become a historical roué. When he was a child, he was sexually abused by a babysitter, and possibly his mother? – which might explain why he later fell in love with numerous cousins, impregnated his half-sister, and slept with a host of children in Harrow. In Cambridge, he bragged to a friend of “seducing no less than 14 damsels, including my mother’s.” maids in addition to various matrons and widows. Byron’s mischievous misconduct was mostly forgiven due to his literary genius, which did not necessarily include labeling William Wordsworth “Turdsworth”, characterizing the work of his rival John Keats as “bed-wetting poetry”, and insinuating that the poet England laureate suffered from a male member that “didn’t work”. Talk about bad boy poetry!
Sigmund Freud
Considered the father of psychoanalysis, aka “talk therapy,” Sigmund Freud was also a world-class cocaine aficionado. He admitted it to a lover and described himself as having “cocaine in his body.” Worse yet, Freud tried to use cocaine to cure his morphine addiction, injecting a friend 3 times a day. 6 months later, the friend’s new addiction to morphine and the cocaine left him deathly thin and scratching imaginary bugs before he died. Later, after suggesting that another patient undergo 2 surgeries that led to her death, Freud made do with “lots of cocaine.” So addicted was Freud that he began to believe that the number 62 was after him. When a hotel assigned Sigmund room 31, he freaked out, 31 being half 62. Worse, he cried! But Freud still believed that a constant habit of white powder was a panacea meant to help humanity in its darkest moments, assuming, of course, that everyone avoided the number 62.
Lord Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes may be the smartest character in literary history, an undoubted detective. But the creator of the gumshoe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, may have been the most gullible man who ever lived. “Séances, mediums, spirit possession—Conan Doyle believed in all of these,” Spalding writes. His greatest shame was believing the photos produced by two girls in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, images that were said to prove the existence of fairies. The fact that the girls’ house was filled with fairy statues and paintings did not deter Conan Doyle, who insisted that the photos were the “most amazing photographs ever published”. Though Sir Arthur was dead by the time the now-grown girls admitted that the historic photos of him were just early photoshops, Conan Doyle would never admit otherwise. Because? Because he believed that “two working-class girls couldn’t fool me!” Sherlock Holmes, he was not.
Nikolai Tesla
Most famous for inventing the alternating current motor, Tesla also predicted in 1926 that people could one day “communicate with each other instantly, regardless of distance.” Tesla described the imagined devices as fitting “in the vest pocket”. But Tesla also lived out his last 30 years squatting several luxury New York City hotels without paying a dime, not to mention falling in love with a pigeon. (We’re not kidding.) “I loved that dove like a man loves a woman,” he said.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was so intelligent that they named him intelligence in his honor. But despite his theory of relativity, the man could not get out of his own way. Einstein loved to sail, but he bought a boat without knowing how to operate it. He also did not learn to swim. Still, Einstein used to float his boat in Peconic Bay on Long Island, but the problem was that Einstein was such a bad “sailor” (once he ended up stranded in Connecticut, another time in Rhode Island) and swimmer that he regularly crashed his boat. against others. and he had to be rescued. However, it cannot be said that Einstein had any problem with his navigational errors, apparently finding them “amusing”. So falling into waters he couldn’t survive was not something Einstein feared; rather, he enjoyed it. To each his own, as they say, everything is relative.
POT
During the Apollo missions in the 1960s, astronaut Alan Shepard sat on top of a rocket for eight hours when he realized he had to urinate. Ground control told him to just relieve himself in his pants. However, NASA learned its lesson and assigned a scientist to find a solution to the astronaut pee problem. Her response from him? Male astronauts are required to strap condoms on their shoulders, the condoms are offered in small, medium, or large sizes. But a “small” condom for a selfish pilot? Even a “medium”? Those proud explorers universally chose “big” condoms, resulting in multiple condoms falling off multiple penises and multiple missions being aborted: loose liquid in a rocket leads to electrical shorts. Instead, NASA more generously renamed the three condom options “big, gigantic, and ginormous,” appeasing astronauts’ fragile egos and ultimately helping America get to the moon.