Unpacking genius: Some of history’s smartest people were also the weirdest

Geniuses occupy plenty of space in our history books, but as it turns out, many of them were more than a little — well, eccentric. As Katie Spalding reveals in “Edison’s Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History’s Greatest Geniuses” (Little, Brown and Company), the mathematician Pythagorus was killed because he so despised beans he wouldn’t cut through a field of them — even though an angry mob was pursuing him. Thomas Edison unsuccessfully tried to invent a telephone to call the dead, and Benjamin Franklin zapped his unknowing dinner guests with electricity. Other bizarre geniuses include: 

Tycho Brahe

A 16th-century Danish astronomer and alchemist, Brahe discovered supernovas and created the world’s most accurate star maps. He also got into a drunken duel over mathematics and ended up with a brass nose to replace the sliced-off original. He spent most of his time imbibing heavily with his best friend, a mead-guzzling pet moose, who died after falling down some stairs. Brahe also died young, due either to eating and drinking off gold-plated flatware or experiments in the lab — regardless, a 20th-century autopsy revealed a great deal of gold plate in his internal organs.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Musical wunderkind or not, Mozart also insisted his new baby be given only water as sustenance — the child survived only because Wolfgang’s mother-in-law fed him in secret. But the musician’s greatest foible was his love of a good poop joke. One love letter he sent to a teenage paramour suggested she “s–t in her bed” and kiss her “own behind.” He kept that dirty focus his whole life, although at 30 he switched from German to the more exalted Latin to make his bathroom puns.  One song he composed included the lyric “it’s difficult to lick my arse and balls.” Mozart couldn’t help himself, Spalding writes, just being in it “for s–ts and giggles.” 

Emilie du Chatelet

Born female in France in the 17th century, Chatelet was supposed to do one thing: Get married. But Emilie knew her worth and challenged her father’s authority by challenging his head knight to a duel. At 17, she stripped 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 Parisian Academy of Sciences and wrote a groundbreaking translation of an Isaac Newton tome.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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Militarily, the great European conqueror really had only 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 in an 1807 excursion and released them where Bonaparte’s party awaited. But the bunnies saw the soldiers on horses and made a mad dash for them, and “the whole [rabbit] phalanx flung itself upon Napoleon.” After initially being chased away, the rabbits regrouped and redoubled their efforts, attacking “the Emperor” from his flank and rear, forcing “the conqueror of conquerors . . . to retreat and leave [the silly wabbits] in possession of the field.”  

Lord Byron

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George Gordon “Lord” Byron was a 19th-century British poet famed for his “Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage” and “Don Juan.” Son to the infamous “Mad Jack Byron,” who left his wife for a love affair with his sister, Lord Byron overcame his sensitivity about a clubfoot to become a historic roué. As a boy he was abused sexually by a nanny — and possibly his mother? —  which might explain why he later fell in love with numerous cousins, got his half-sister pregnant, and bedded any number of boys at Harrow. At Cambridge, he bragged to a friend about “seducing no less than 14 Damsels including my mother’s maids besides sundry Matrons and Widows.” Byron’s naughty misbehavior was mostly forgiven because of his literary genius, which didn’t necessarily include labeling William Wordsworth as “Turdsworth,” characterizing rival John Keats’ work as “piss-a-bed poetry,” and implying England’s poet laureate was afflicted with a male member that “didn’t work.” Talk about poetry’s bad boy! 

Sigmund Freud

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Considered the father of psychoanalysis, a k a “talk therapy,” Sigmund Freud was also a world-class cocaine aficionado. He admitted as much to a lover, describing himself as being flush with “cocaine in his body.” Worse, Freud tried to use cocaine to cure morphine addiction, injecting a friend with it 3 times a day. 6 months later, the friend’s new addiction to both morphine and cocaine left him deathly thin and scratching at imaginary bugs before dying. Later, after suggesting another patient have 2 surgeries that led to her death, Freud coped with “a lot of cocaine.” So addicted was Freud that he began to believe the number 62 was after him. When a hotel assigned Sigmund to room 31, he freaked, 31 being half of 62. Even worse, he wailed! But Freud still believed a steady habit of the white powder was a panacea destined to help humanity through its darkest times — assuming, of course, everyone avoided the number 62. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes may be the cleverest character in literary history, an un-dupable detective. But the gumshoe’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, may have been the most gullible man ever.  “Seances, mediums, spirit possession — Conan Doyle believed in it all,” Spalding writes. His greatest embarrassment was believing the photos produced by two young girls in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, pictures said to prove the existence of fairies. That the girls’ house was filled with fairy statues and paintings didn’t dissuade Conan Doyle, who insisted the photos were the “most astounding photographs ever published.” Though Sir Arthur was dead when the now-grown girls admitted their historic photos were just early Photoshopping, Conan Doyle would never admit otherwise. Why? Because he believed “two working-class girls wouldn’t be able to fool me!” Sherlock Holmes, he was not. 

Nikolai Tesla

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Most famous for inventing the alternating current motor, Tesla also predicted in 1926 that people would one day be able to “communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance.” Tesla described the imagined devices as fitting “in the vest pocket.” But Tesla also lived his last 30 years squatting in various New York City luxury hotels without ever paying a dime, not to mention falling in love with a pigeon. (We aren’t kidding.) “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman,” he said.

Albert Einstein

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Albert Einstein was so smart they named smartness after him. But his theory of relativity notwithstanding, the man couldn’t get out of his own way. Einstein loved sailing, but bought a boat without knowing how to operate it. Neither did he ever learn to swim. Still Einstein often floated his boat in Long Island’s Peconic Bay, but the problem was that Einstein was so bad a “sailor” — once he ended up stranded in Connecticut, another time in Rhode Island — and swimmer that he regularly crashed his boat into others and had to be rescued. It can’t be said Einstein had any problem with his sailing snafus though, apparently finding them “hilarious.” So falling into waters he couldn’t survive wasn’t something Einstein feared; rather, he enjoyed it. To each his own, as they say — it’s all relative. 

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NASA

During the Apollo missions in the 1960s, astronaut Alan Shepard sat atop a rocket for eight hours when he realized he had to pee. Ground control told him to just relieve himself in his pants. NASA learned its lesson though, assigning a scientist to find a solution to the astronauts’ pee-pee problem. Her answer? The male astronauts should strap condoms onto their manhoods, prophylactics offered in small, medium, or large. But a “small” condom for an egotistical flyboy? Even a “medium”? Those proud explorers universally chose “large” condoms, resulting in various condoms falling off various penises and a number of missions being aborted — loose liquid in a rocket ship leads to electrical shorts. NASA instead renamed the three condom choices more generously as “large, gigantic, and humongous,” appeasing the frail egos of the astronauts and eventually helping America make it to the moon.