| Description |
342 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-332) and index. |
| Contents |
The mathmatical cult leader Pythagoras, and his incredibly stupid death -- Confucius was an ugly nerd with low self-esteem -- Never, ever hire Leonardo da Vinci -- Galileo utterly fails to read the room -- The entirely unbelievable life of Tycho Brahe -- When René Descartes got baked -- Isaac Newton and the Philosopher's Stone -- Mozart uses his superstar status to tell us all to kiss his arse... over and over again -- Benjamin Franklin uses world-changing technology to prank friends, self -- Émilie du Châtelet cares not for your social mores, and she will fight you in her underwear to prove it -- Johann Christian Reil invents psychiatry and things get really weird really quickly -- Napoleon Bonaparte's fluffiest foe -- Lord Byron, the patron saint of fuckboys -- Ada Lovelace's (husband's) family jewels -- Galois hunting -- John Couch Adams ignores his mail, loses Neptune -- You really woudn't want to hang out with Karl Marx -- Charles Darwin: glutton; worm dad; murderer? -- James Glaisher, the Victorian weatherman who nearly became an astronaut -- Sigmund Freud uses cocaine so much he thought numbers wanted to kill him -- Arthur Conan Doyel gets pranked so hard he claims fairies exist -- Thomas Edison's lesser-known invention: dial-a-ghost -- Real-life supervillian Nicola Tesla takes the term 'pigeon fancying' a bit too literally -- Marie Curie defies all the odds to accidently poison both herself and thousands of strangers -- Albert Einstein: public nuisance, love rat -- Kurt Gödel, the Disney princess who broke time -- Maya Angelou, in: stop! or my mom will shoot -- Ernest Hemingway may have been the worst double agent ever -- Yukio Mishima and the shortest, gayest fascist coup in history -- NASA forgets about women, toilets, and the metric system |
| Summary |
"'As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius--but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.' So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition. For example: Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, believed that he could communicate with the undead and built the world’s very first hotline to heaven: the Spirit Phone ; Marie and Pierre Curie, famous for discovering radioactivity, slept next to a lump of radioactive material for years and strapped it to their arms to watch it burn them in real-time ; Lord Byron, acclaimed British poet, literally took a bear with him to university ; Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion, but he also looked up at the sun without eye protection. The result? Three days of blindness ; Tesla, whose scientific work led to the invention of the AC unit, fell in love with a pigeon. Edison's Ghosts is filled with examples of the so-called best of humanity doing, to put it bluntly, some really dumb shit. You’ll discover stories that deserve to be told but never are: the hilarious, regrettable, and downright bafflingly lesser-known achievements that never made it into our history books, until now." --publisher's website |
| Subject |
Gifted persons -- Anecdotes.
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Eccentrics and eccentricities -- Anecdotes.
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Genius.
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| Genre |
Anecdotes.
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| Added Title |
Untold weirdness of history's greatest geniuses |
| ISBN |
9780316529525 |
|
0316529524 |
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