Peruse the documents of any era—newspapers, bills of sale, wills—and you find nothing but forgotten names. A famous name brings an almost electric shock of recognition, that in these crowds of nobodies and once-were-somebodies is a person you can attach a face and a reputation to. The collector and the historian value those rare documents. But I always find myself wondering about the other people. And buried in these footnotes of history are brilliant, fatally flawed thinkers who rose to dizzying heights of intellect and even fame, only to come crashing down into disaster, ridicule, or just the utter silence of oblivion.
Occasionally, I find others who share my predilection for the forgotten ephemera of genius. There’s the Dead Media web site, devoted to “the numerous experiments that died on the barbed wire of technological advance. The Edison kinetophone. Gaumont’s Chronophone. The synchronoscope. The movietone. Phonofilm. The graphophonoscope. The vitaphone…” There are fellow antiquarians like Edmund Pearson and Van Wyck Brooks, whose books I can scarcely open without feeling the need to give the secret handshake for the Universal Brotherhood of Collectors of Obscurity. And there’s my old college roommate, Shawn Lani, now the senior exhibit designer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He contracted a collector’s mania for household photos—anonymous black-and-white photographs from yard sales or old wire service archives, many lacking a date or even a name, but occasionally capturing a serendipitous genius in their composition. We are all curators at heart, I suppose, of items that we fear no one else will have time for.
Why write about such things?—you may ask.
And if it’s not you, surely someone will ask this question. The man or woman of promise who has nothing but excuses and regrets to offer at the end of the day—these people we do worse than despise. We avert our gaze and excuse ourselves from their presence.
And why not? We are also a nation of successes. This, at least, is what every demagogue, advertiser, and con artist tells us. We want to believe that we are good people, and that opportunity is there for those with the spirit to achieve it. Yet we laud men and women who have no better quality than the possession of money, and who achieve their success on the backs of the swindled and disdained. We want to believe that there is something more to their success than mere greed and luck. Even more than a moral loser, we cannot bear the thought of an immoral success.
There are moral successes, of course. But for each person credited with a winning innovation, there are the losers who pursued a similar path to failure. Perhaps their timing was wrong. Maybe they lacked the ruthless force of personality that propels the winners of history. In the end, they might even have been undone by weaknesses in character that had little to do with the merits of their ideas.
And so I began this book, an account of those who have fallen in their pursuits. Whole books could be unearthed on each of their lives—and I hope that happens someday. But for now, these excavations may suffice.