“(BANG! BANG! BANG!) Watson, come here! I need you!”
-Alexander Graham Hammer invents the telephone
Did anyone else hear that Alexander Graham Bell had spilled some acid on his trousers and that’s why he called out to his assistant? Because that’s the story I remember from my childhood.
Yes, I have heard that repeatedly and seen it depicted in educational films.
Though I think, having been stuck with a name like “Philo”, he should have considered a change of name. “Philo Pharnsworth” is only a minor change, but has a beautiful symmetry! 
He could have been a character in an old video game I once played.
On the other hand, Kip Thorne, whose contributions to physics were greater, is completely obscure to most people, and if they know of him at all, it’s probably as the science advisor for Interstellar.
You (or whomever you heard that from) were probably conflating him with Ira Remsen, who I daresay is completely forgotten aside from that one account of that one incident.
Perhaps, but Googling, the acid story is a widely told myth. Here, for instance, is a letter to the editor of The New Yorker from Susan Cheever (not sure if this is the same one as the daughter of John Cheever), exploding the myth and identifying herself as a great-granddaughter of Thomas Watson.
As to the High School dropouts, credentialism, etc., debate …
One of the things that has changed hugely since ~1900, much less since ~1850 is the total body of human scientific and engineering knowledge and the extreme detail and subtlety of it today.
The e.g. Wrights were indeed innovative scientists / engineers despite lack of formal schooling. But the overall tech environment they were opertaing in was simple enough that even with that limited background, they could still advance the leading edge of current science.
Nowadays the effort required to obtain a PhD, whether or not you get the sheepskin, is the bare price of admission to begin looking at the leading edge of current science.
Setting aside the strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in our current time, it’s easy to elevate the Wrights, or Einstein, or whoever to truly superhuman status. Because they did serious innovation on what looks to us like a shoestring.
Depends on the subject. Probably true for bleeding edge theoretical physics. But much less true of, say, AI, which isn’t much more than linear algebra and statistics. Although the modern transformer architecture came out of a corporate lab (Google), it’s something that just about any motivated person could have done. I haven’t kept track of exactly who has developed what in this space, but I anticipate that there’s been a fair amount from people with no direct education in AI/ML.
There are a lot of current problems that seem to be of the nature of “putting existing stuff together in the right away.” Supersonic airliners, autonomous air taxis, fully reusable rockets, renewable energy systems, etc. More on the side of engineering than pure science, but nevertheless requiring a scientific approach. Many of these are accessible to people that haven’t gotten a PhD in the subject (if there even is a subject).
I suppose one of the side effects of modern technology being a couple steps from magic is that total understanding–or virtually any understanding–has become impossible. An iPhone is a solid slab filled with magic and while a motivated kid might be able to replace the battery or a component or two, diving any deeper is essentially impossible. Even with an electron microscope they’d make zero progress.
There are some upsides to modern tech, with the availability of Arduinos and 3D printers and free software and the like, but that still only gets you to a tiny slice of the technology spectrum. Whereas a tube radio could be disassembled and fully understood by one person.
Philo was a fairly popular name in the 19th century and then a weird one in the 20th century. Philo Vance was by far the most popular American amateur detective in the 1920s, but he was a caricature of an intellectual.
Speaking of such, there have been literal high schoolers who’ve taken advantage of 3D printing and Arduinos and the like to invent truly useful things, like improved prosthetic limbs. They might not be on the front lines of science, but they are on the front lines of technology.
Brings to mind the Geroge Washington Principle:
“It’s easy to tell the truth when you’re the one holding the axe.”
Yes, from what I recall reading, that was their first discovery - that all the stuff they were reading was not accurate. Then they did detailed studies of wing shapes and lift characteristics.
I vaguely recall reading too that they put together their own engine, which if true was an interesting accomplishment.
I saw a presentation at Bell Labs once, where they played a movie made about 1908 when the Wrights were demonstrating the Flyer in France. The presenter says “notice how the hoizon bobs up and down. The Flyer with the tail in front was dynamically unstable and required constant pilot correction to stay close to level.”
Just tell them it works the same way as their tinfoil hat.
Ah, now I know why my mind is always so clear when I’m sitting in my car!
Didn’t Feynman say in an interview that taking a radio apart was a right of passage for scientists and engineers?
Absolutely. I hope that the increasing accessibility of these things doesn’t cause people to become dismissive of those working in pure tech. 3D printing, AI, etc. makes some of these things too easy, right? Except that the availability of low-cost, high-productivity tools makes the possible outcomes that much greater. Things that would be impossible previously without a team of people and years of effort. But to be truly effective we need generalists that understand the principles behind a wide set of things and are able to use the tools effectively. It’s a collection of skills that wasn’t necessarily in great demand in the past. Maybe AI will reduce the rate of specialization that we see today.
FWIW, there’s a neat little museum in Rigby, ID where Farnsworth lived. We stopped there on the way back from the Eclipse in 2017:
Yes, they (along with their mechanic Charlie Taylor who did most of the work on the engine) developed engines light and powerful enough for their airplanes.
I strongly recommend this book for a very detailed and well-researched biography of the Wright brothers:
Engines weren’t really something you bought from the engine store in those days. Especially for aircraft. Weight versus horsepower was the previously insolvable problem that hindered most amateur inventors in the 19th century.
Once they had decided to attempt powered flight, the Wrights calculated they needed an engine that produced at least 8 horsepower and weighed no more than 200 pounds (91 kilograms). A quick survey of the automotive market showed there was no such engine available and they would have to make their own. An acquaintance at the nearby Buckeye Irons and Brass Works advised then that they could save weight if they cast the engine block from aluminum. Although this was a soft metal, alloys had recently been developed that were much stronger – both Benz and Daimler in Germany were successfully making engines with aluminum blocks. The Wrights decided to cast the block from an alloy of 92% aluminum and 8% copper. …
"The completed engine weighed 180 pounds and developed 12 horsepower at 1,025 revolutions per minute.
No question. Understanding the difference in breadth and depth of technical knowledge is a challenge to a lot of would-be home inventors. Thinking you have the insight to see past all the formal science mistakes to the key misunderstandings without knowing the basis of the current knowledge is a hallmark of quacks. The “Einstein was wrong” crowd.
Perhaps, but I wasn’t talking just about tinkering with how things work. I meant knowledge in general and perceptions about life.
One of my favorite observations I like to share is from back when I was in college.
People’s expectations about medicine and health care in the 20th century made an astounding transformation.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, three expectation was that doctors might be able to tell you what was killing you. A sickness could be treated with what we now call nursing to keep fluid and calories to fight off a virus. There were some surgical techniques but they were pretty crude by modern standards. Infection was largely fatal, and systemic diseases like diabetes had no basic foundation. There was actually a treatment for childhood (type 1) diabetes that was starvation therapy. It consisted of severely limiting caloric intake. There were some children who survived long enough to make it until the role of the pancreas and insulin were discovered.
By the end of the 20th Century, the common expectation was that you go to the doctor and not only find out what specifically was wrong, but also how to cure it. Nether of which was actually true in many cases.
Flight has a similar profile. At the beginning of the 20th Century, heavier than air powered flight was still a dream. By the end, air travel was ubiquitous, jets were supersonic, and humans had been to the Moon.
Global communication had gone from the telegraph to email.
That kind of transformation shaped society’s expectations of what kind of growth would continue to occur. It sets the stage for expectations about how information is achieved.
Some of the appeal of Steampunk is nostalgia for a simpler time when iconoclast inventors could seemingly make incredible, impossible things.