Deceit, bad luck and technology
01 October 2007
If you have ever looked on enviously at someone else living your life; the job you should have had, the career path you should have followed, a new book should provide solace. However hard done by you feel, the geniuses that missed out described in Mike Green’s The Nearly Men: A Chronicle of Scientific Failure will bring comfort as you realise: ‘It could be worse’.
Green’s book induces a Homer Simpson-style ‘Dohhh’ with tales of near-misses and catastrophic misjudgements. People like Geoffrey Dummer, who ‘invented’ the integrated circuit 10 years before Jack Kilby yet failed to convince the British Government that ICs were the future. Kilby, on the other hand, created the concept of integrated circuits while working at Texas Instruments in 1968 and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000.
Many are tales of people dying in poverty while others go from strength to strength, financially and with their names forever linked to a revolutionary invention. The Nearly Men include Alan Turing who missed out on credit for computer advances by dying too soon; Robert Hooke, who pre-empted Isacc Newton’s theories and Jean-Baptise Lamarck, who evolved the theory of man before Darwin. Better-known examples are of Nikola Tesla, who died penniless, despite being the one to put forward ideas of the radio communications forever associated with Guglielmo Marconi; Antonio Meucci, eclipsed by Alexander Graham Bell and Joseph Swan who designed the first electric lightbulb but did not market it as cannily as Thomas Edison did.
This first book by Green, an electronics journalist, is a reassuring tome for anyone who feels hard done by. When it feels like no-one appreciates your efforts or recognises your worth, pick this up and, most importantly, learn from the unfortunate experiences. The Nearly Men: A Chronicle of Scientific Failure by Mike Green is published by Tempus Publishing and is available through Amazon.co.uk, price: £9.95.
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