1. Albert Einstein
We start off with the most obvious one, but let us leave the things we already DO know behind, and focus on the interesting parts. You see, little Einstein gave his parents the fright of their life when he was born, because he was such a large and unusual looking baby, they thought that he was practically a monster. The doctors were afraid that he will be mentally damaged too, which is kind of interesting, because for about nine of his first years he WAS a little bit slow when it came to speaking. And although he managed to become bilingual, he always had difficulties with spelling out words both in English and German. Now, what's interesting in this is that according to some people, many geniuses have this same problem as children.
Einstein was also a ladies' man in his adult life. After he divorced from his first wife (with whom he had two sons, and an illegitimate daughter about whom we don't know much, but she was thought to be mentally challenged, and she was given to adoption) because of his infidelity, he married his cousin. On whom he cheated again, with his secretary. Einstein had about six other women while he was married to Elsa (the second wife), and she appeared to know about his affairs too. And she tolerated them, not like Einstein's first wife, with whom Einstein actually made a contract about what she was and wasn't allowed to do (like: "you will stop talking to me if i request it", or "you will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons").
And speaking about Einstein and women... here's what he thought about women in the war:
"In my opinion, the patriotic women ought to be sent to the front in the next war instead of the men. It would at least be a novelty in this dreary sphere of infinite confusion, and besides—why should not such heroic feelings on the part of the fair sex find a more picturesque outlet than in attacks on a defenseless civilian?"
2. Nikola Tesla
Nowadays the internet puts Tesla on an almost God-like pedestal, which Is pretty wrong. Sure, he was a genius, but he wasn't quite the superhero for Edison's "super villain". But let me tell you a couple of things that you probably didn't know about Tesla yet. First off, Tesla was Serbian, and he arrived to America from Croatia. (For those who don't understand, he was almost like my family and I, as in - we all are from Romania, but we are actually Hungarians.)
Tesla's mother was a little inventor too - she invented all kinds of little household appliances in her spare time -, while his father was... you will never guess... a priest. He had four siblings: Dane, Angelina, Marica and Milka (Ha-ha!)
Tesla had such a great mind that he could memorize whole books, he spoke 8 different languages (Serbian, English, Czech, German, French, Italian, Latin, and Hungarian), he could visualize everything in his head without taking notes, and he lived to be 86 years old.
Besides being the "master of electricity", he was also a pretty good showman - but he also had a great flaw: he couldn't for the life of him sell anything. Sadly, this threw him into poverty almost all the time, because the money he earned via his patents he usually spent on more experiments.
When he was a little boy, he suffered from cholera for nine months, and nearly died a bunch of times. He was also accused of being the reason why his brother, Dane, died - Tesla was five years old and he apparently scared the horse Dane was riding on.
Also, during his college years he managed to become addicted to gambling, and he lost quite a big sum of money, and also fell out of school, and because he was too embarrassed to tell his family, he basically cut all connections with them.
In his older age he developed OCD (Is that surprising?), and he stayed celibate all his life, even when there were a whole lot of women throwing themselves at him. He was considered a little bit of an insane scientist by most people around him - and the best relationship he had was with a pigeon.
Yeah, apparently he was one of those pigeon feeding guys.
3. Thomas Edison
Since we talked about Tesla, I couldn't leave Edison out now, could I?
Edison is reported to be of Dutch ancestry. His father is from Canada, tho, from where he had to escape in a hurry because he was involved in an unsuccessful rebellion.
As a child, Edison was a little bit distracted - he was once even called "addled" by his teacher because of this. That, apparently was the end of the teacher's job, and Edison's official schooling - it took him no more than three months. In the end he was actually home-schooled by his mother.
He also had some illnesses during his childhood - one of which was scarlet fever and because of this he developed hearing problems.
He managed to save a boy from being struck by a train, and because the boy's father was really grateful, he trained Edison in being a telegraph operator.
Edison also had two wives - and he had three kids from each of them.
Edison was the reason why electric chairs were invented- Edison was a firm believer that alternating current was way more dangerous than direct current (true), and he decided to prove this by practically electrocuting a bunch of living beings, mostly stray animals, unwanted pets, and the famous Topsy, an elephant, who killed a whole bunch of people before and his caretakers wanted to put him to sleep anyway.
This is all nice and all, but apparently he was a firm believer of non-violence too. I find this kind of well... farfetched. Apparently on one occasion he said that he was proud of himself for not inventing weapons. Well, sure, you can't really throw an electric chair towards someone, but still... the way he seemed to show no remorse at killing those animals is a but disturbing (but then again if we think that way we might have problems with eating meat too...)
And this concludes today's short little post - though I DO think that I will gather up some info about more scientific geniuses later on (feel free to write your opinion about who you want to learn more about).
