Edison’s Ghosts
by Katie Spalding
The more you delve into the stories behind history’s greatest names, the more you realize they have something in common: a mystifying lack of common sense.
- Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, believed that he could communicate with the dead and built the world’s very first hotline to heaven: the Sprit 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 in real time.
- Lord Byron, the 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.
- Nikola 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 rarely are: the hilarious, regrettable, and downright baffling lesser-known achievements that never made it into our history books—until now.
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Canoe Trips
Canoe Trips
