Edison’s Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History’s Greatest Geniuses

Trade Paperback

Publishers WeeklyBest Summer Reads

Overturn everything you knew about historys greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there’s a finer line between “genius” and “idiot” than we’ve previously known.

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 Spaldings 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 theres probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldnt. 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 worlds 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. Youll 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.