1 Guglielmo Marconi: How Bribery Killed the Radio Star
The Good: Winning the Nobel Prize for inventing radio-transmission technology.
The Totally Infuriating: Winning the Nobel Prize for inventing radio-transmission technology when you aren’t the guy who invented it. In the early 1890s, Nikola Tesla discovered (and widely published) the means to transmit and receive radio signals using high-frequency electric currents. The next year, Guglielmo Marconi took out an English patent on the same system.
A remarkably good sport, Tesla decided to simply patent his work in America. Then Marconi tried to do the same thing. At first, the U.S. Patent Office resisted, noting that Marconi’s claim to know nothing of Tesla’s work was more than a little ridiculous. But Marconi had something Tesla didn’t—connections. His family ties to English aristocracy helped the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. thrive and led to his friendships with American luminaries such as Thomas Edison.
The original duty of a wedding’s “Best Man” was to serve as armed backup for the groom in case he had to resort to kidnapping his intended bride.
In 1904, Marconi’s networking paid off. The U.S. Patent Office suddenly changed its mind. For reasons never fully explained, Tesla’s patent was voided and given to Marconi, who became rich and won the Nobel. Poor ol’ Tesla died, well, poor. But the story doesn’t end there. In 1943, the Patent Office switched sides again and gave the radio patent back to Tesla.
2 Caravaggio: That Guy Who Makes John McEnroe Look Calm
Caravaggio was a 16th-and 17th-century Italian painter who’s best known for creating the technique of tenebrism, or dramatic illumination. But he was also a world-class thrower of temper tantrums—long after he was old enough to know better. Famous for starting fights all over Rome, Caravaggio had a rap sheet a mile long. His offenses included the mundane (attacking another artist, 1600), the comical (throwing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter, 1604), and the just plain dumb (killing a man over a disputed tennis score, 1606).
3 Biagio da Cesena: Patron Saint of Bad Art Critics
As Papal Master of Ceremonies for Pope Paul III in the mid-16th century, Biagio da Cesena had a legitimate reason to be interested in the frescoes Michelangelo was painting in the Sistine Chapel. But he didn’t have to be so nosy about it. Da Cesena spent four years bugging Michelangelo to give him a sneak peek at the work, and then, when he finally did see it, he tried to have the art destroyed. Michelangelo had included nude figures in some of the scenes, and da Cesena called them a disgrace.
Fed up with the Master of Ceremonies’ whining, the artist painted da Cesena into one of the circles of hell. In response, da Cesena did the mature thing and told the pope that Mikey was picking on him. But the pope was apparently not fond of tattling. “God has given me authority in heaven and on Earth,” he declared, “but my writ does not extend to hell.”
When Henry Budd died in 1862, he left his substantial fortune to his two sons on the condition that neither sullied his lip with a mustache.
4 Pete Best: That Guy Who Just Won’t Let It Go
In 1962, drummer Pete Best was fired by the Beatles in favor of Ringo Starr. Since then, he’s embarked on a series of embarrassing and absurd displays of ill-affection that make him the biggest sore loser in the history of the universe. Cases in point: (1) getting into a fight with the Beatles during which a rabid Best fan gave George Harrison a black eye; (2) suing Ringo Starr for libel (Starr told Playboy that Best was fired because of drug abuse); (3) suing Trivial Pursuit for libel (they accidentally claimed Best was dead); and (4) capitalizing off the Fab Four well into old age with his deceptively named album Best of the Beatles.
5 Arthur Schopenhauer: One of Those “Glass Half Empty” Kind of Guys
It’s probably safe to say that a man known as “the philosopher of pessimism” would be kind of a downer at parties. Enter Schopenhauer, whose writings described life as a continuous toil toward death. Obsessive about his routines, Schopenhauer began each day by reading the paper to become “informed of the world’s miseries.” He spent his afternoons teaching and would purposely schedule his lectures at the same time as those of competing philosopher Hegel—just to see which instructor students would choose. In the evening, Schopenhauer either went to the opera (where he would angrily confront latecomers and “loud-coughers”) or whiled away the hours insulting women down at the local pub.
The infamous Venus flytrap lives only in one tiny swath of natural habitat—a 60-mile radius around Wilmington, North Carolina.