This got me thinking: There will be (serious) examples of this sort of thing in real life, where someone has invented/discovered something, been ignored/ridiculed/rejected, and basically said “I’ll show you!” before going off an acheiving great success with their invention/discovery (even if posthumously, although it’s hard for the deceased to gloat over finally showing those fools…)
Two examples to get everyone going: Firstly, Galileo. He was right about the whole Earth revolving around the sun thing, but he still found himself in front of the Inquisition and forced to recant. He’s now regarded as the father of modern science.
Secondly, Col Isaac Lewis invented a practical light machine gun and even managed to fire it from an aeroplane in 1912.
The US Ordnance Board basically said “That’s nice but we’re good for automatic weapons, thanks”, so Lewis reportedly called them “Ignorant Hacks”, before heading to Belgium and partnering with BSA to produce his machine gun design, which ended up being adopted by the entire British Empire and later the US, seeing service in two World Wars and making Lewis vast sums of money in royalties (he was reported as turning down over $1m in royalties from the US Government, but made quite a bit from the British).
So… what other historical examples are there? Maniacal laughter, crazy hair, and Tesla Coils are completely optional.
Marco Polo, kind of sort of. The story (maybe apocryphal) goes that he was urged on his deathbed to recant his crazy, outlandish lies about black rocks that burned, worms that made cloth, money made from paper, cloth that could be thrown in a fire that didn’t burn, etc. When the priests asked him to admit his lies and get right with God, he supposedly replied “I did not tell half of what I saw!”
At the Monterey Pop Festival 1964, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townsend of the Who almost came to blows backstage because the Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience each refused to follow the other, partly because both had an instrument smashing thing they wanted to do and neither wanted the other to steal their thunder, and partly because they were both badasses and neither wanted to get upstaged. After the Who won a coin flip, Hendrix jumped up on a chair and announced to everyone in earshot that “all bets were off” and if the Who got to go on first he was going to pull out all of the stops and give everybody a show nobody would ever forget. He was right.
A mild version, but I recall in an interview with a scientist who had trapped a single atom and a single electron in a “Penning Trap” and then devised apparatus* that made them visible to the human eye who said it was in part because he’d been told in college by physics teachers that such small particles would never be isolated and treated as unique individual objects, or seen by eye. So he trapped particles long term, gave them individual pet names and invented a technique to see them (as dots of light).
IIRC, it involved a laser illuminator and a reversed telescope mirror
You have various authors like Tom Clancy, Frank Herbert, and J.K. Rowling who had their first books rejected by multiple publishers before becoming best-sellers.
Here’s a recent one: last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient, Dan Shechtman, was ridiculed and ostracized for many years for the work that ended up getting him the Nobel Prize. In 1982 Shectman discovered quasicrystals, which appeared to violate all the rules about how crystals are supposed to fit together. He was laughed at, mocked, insulted and kicked out of his research group. Two time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling ridiculed him mercilessly, saying “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” After other researchers proved his work, the Nobel Prize committee said Shechtman “eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.” Shechtman himself said:
“For a long time it was me against the world. I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography. The leader of the opposition to my findings was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society and one of the most famous scientists in the world. For years, 'til his last day, he fought against quasi-periodicity in crystals. He was wrong, and after a while, I enjoyed every moment of this scientific battle, knowing that he was wrong.”
No doubt europeans would be in the New World without him, but perhaps later and perhaps giving a vastly different history. So Chris’s “I’ll show them all!” might arguably be the most profound of them all. Imagine the U.S. as a French, Spanish, or Portugese colony instead of British, for instance.
Billy Mitchellvigorously (and at time obnoxiously) argued that airplanes dropping bombs could sink a battleship. The Secretary of War called Mitchell a “nitwit” and offered to stand on the deck of any ship Mitchell wanted to sink.
Link to Simon Winchester’s book The Map that Changed the World about the man who documented the geologic stratification of the Earth’s crust in the UK and its implications for geologic time - he was ostracized for years by his British scientist peers.
Wrong about the size of the world but right that it could be circumnavigated. It wasn’t immediately known that he hadn’t made it to the far east, so he had his moment of triumph.
Even if we take that away he still showed the world that no, you don’t drop off the edge of the world into the pit of the stomach of the wurm of the world’s end.
Would it qualify, if in search of more green technology, we started building the like of hemp cars like Henry Ford did? If I ahve it straight, no-one was interested in the hemp car back then. But we might go to composite materials from renewable sources, which seems to me to vindicate Ford’s claim?
Does it matter if vindication comes after death of the inventor?
An entrepreneur here in Ireland called Sean Quinn, started as pretty much a one man band, but grew his business rapidly with some very shrewd dealings. He was involved mainly in quarrying and construction, road building, and related types of work. As his business grew he required ever larger quantities of cement, which he had been sourcing from what at the time was the dominant supplier in Northern Ireland, Blue Circle cement in Co Tyrone.
However, this was a time in Northern Ireland when sectarianism was rampant, and as far as the protestant ownership of Blue circle were concerned the catholic, GAA supporting Sean Quinn was pretty much dirt on their heels, for all that at this stage we could well have been their biggest customer.
Disgusted with the level of service he was receiving, Quinn showed exactly why he eventually became a self-made billionaire. His reaction was to say “fuck’em”, and open his own cement company, Quinn Cement, part of what eventually became the Quinn-group.
At a stroke not only did Blue Circle lose their biggest customer, but they gained a massive rival, and it was not very long before it was Quinn Cement that were now the largest supplier of cement products in Ireland.
Quinn repeated this trick a few years later. Unhappy with the service and supply from the nationalised Northern Ireland electricity board, Quinn erected a series of wind turbines on the Fermanagh - Cavan border, and proceded to not only power his own factories, but to sell electricity back to the previously arrogant NIE.
