The Most Embarrassing Failures of Famous Geniuses
A broken clock is right twice a day, but even the best clocks need a battery change every once in a while. Clocks run on batteries, right? We’ve never mounted a clock. Is that just watches? Look, you know what we mean. They can’t all be winners, even from the biggest winners in history.
Benjamin Franklin’s Turkey Electrocution
Franklin is famous for his experiments with electricity, which — much like his social life — apparently included poking it into anything he could. At one point, he became convinced an electrocuted turkey would be tastier than a normal one, and in attempting to demonstrate this, he accidentally touched the electrified wire intended for the turkey and electrocuted himself instead. The audience presumably remained unswayed.
Francis Bacon’s Frozen Chicken
Franklin wasn’t the first to embarrass himself experimenting with poultry. In 1626, Bacon was determined to prove that you could freeze and preserve a chicken by stuffing it full of snow. Not only did this presumably not work, given that ice fisting isn’t a common meat preservation method today, he caught pneumonia out there in the cold and died. Boy, must his face have been red.
Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Doll
In 1890, the world wasn’t ready for Chatty Cathy. Literally. The technology just wasn’t there. That didn’t stop Edison from manufacturing a line of talking dolls with phonographs inside their torsos and all the existential horror implied thereby. Within weeks, Edison pulled the dolls from the market after reports that they broke easily, sounded bad to the point of seeming haunted, and looked pretty haunted, too.
Mark Twain’s Ill-Fated Start-ups
Twain was one of the highest paid authors in 19th-century America, but it somehow wasn’t enough for him. Convinced his publisher was scamming him, he started his own publishing company and promptly ran it into the ground. He then sank what was left of his fortune into a four-ton typesetting machine that didn’t work. He might have hated money more than the post office.
Albert Einstein’s Cosmological Constant
When Einstein was forming his theory of general relativity, it was believed the universe was static, so when his equations kept predicting some wacky expanding universe, he added a term he called the cosmological constant to make them work. When he realized he was right the first time, he called it his “biggest blunder,” but there’s a twist: It turns out the cosmological constant is pretty helpful to understanding dark matter. It just goes to show that, with enough polishing, even the biggest turd can shine.
