Nickola Tesla

Actual geniuses are rare. While most people hold them in awe after their deaths, they’re lives are sometimes difficult and a little strange. They are usually so involved with their projects and inventions, that everything else is no longer something that interests them. Many are anti-social and virtual recluses. There always seems to be a balance of sorts. Super intelligence balanced with a lack of social graces or concerns with others. It’s a terrible price to pay. Here are a few trivia tidbits of some of our better-known geniuses.

• Thomas Edison established an “invention factory” with the hope of producing one new invention every ten days. In one four year period he obtained 300 patents, or one every five days. In all he patented nearly 1300 inventions.

• Alexander Graham Bell was working to improve the telegraph when he invented the telephone.

• Charles Dickens believed that to get a really good night’s sleep the bed must be aligned north to south. In this manner, he thought, the magnetic currents would flow straight through the recumbent body.

• The botanist, George Washington Carver, who is best known for his pioneering work with peanuts, developed 536 dyes when experimenting with plant leaves, fruits, stems, and roots.

Ben Franklin

• Margaret Mead’s first foray into the observation of human behavior occurred before she was a teenager. As a young person of eight or nine years, she recorded the patterns of speech of her younger sisters.

• Ben Franklin was cautious in performing his famous kite experiment in which he charged a Leyden jar with electricity drawn from the clouds. The first two men who tried to duplicate his experiment were electrocuted.

• Lewis Carroll, by his own account, wrote 98,721 letters in the last thirty-seven years of his life.

• There was an intention in 1912 of giving a Nobel Prize jointly to Nickola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Both were deserving of the honor but Tesla refused because of his intense dislike of Edison. The Nobel Prize was instead given to a Swedish inventor of lesser merit.

Thomas Edison