The Most Overrated People In History

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Interesting little fun piece by Mark Juddery on the eight most overrated people in history.  Juddery’s list includes Columbus, Gandhi, Lady Godiva, Edison and King Arthur.  As well, it includes this saintly conservative.

Whatever your affiliation, Reagan just doesn’t deserve all that hype! He was always a popular President, but he has since been recast (mainly by conservative historians) as a great one as well. Yes, you can easily place him on that pedestal. You would merely need to ignore the Iran-Contra scandal, the huge budget deficits, his environment ignorance, his do-nothing reaction to the looming AIDS epidemic, his courting of Saddam Hussein, and numerous other blunders.

That much I knew but this next person surprised me somewhat.

The world of invention has had a few scoundrels –- and Marconi, the alleged inventor of radio, makes Edison look good. Nikola Tesla, one of Edison’s most brilliant engineers, discovered (and published) a way to transmit and receive radio signals in 1895. For all his genius, Tesla is the forgotten man of invention. He had been royally screwed by his boss, and would be conned even more disgracefully by Marconi. Marconi, a wealthy tinkerer with family ties to the English aristocracy, took credit for Tesla’s discovery, patenting it in England before Tesla got around to it. The Yugoslav-American Tesla then decided to make do with a US patent, so Marconi rushed it through to the US Patent Office, playing dumb when the office suggested that he must surely have seen Tesla’s papers. He eventually used his friends in high places to take out the patent, while Tesla’s patent was voided. Marconi became even wealthier, won a Nobel Prize, and is still known as the inventor of radio. Face it, the guy was a scum! In 1943, however, the Patent Office gave the patent back to Tesla, which was pretty useless as Tesla and Marconi were both dead.

I’ll have to dig deeper into this one.  As for Lady Godiva, it pains me to read that she probably never paraded about town on her white horse naked to the bone.  Oh, cruel world!

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