Pulp Fiction from the '30s and '40s and Spy Thrillers from the '60s have long been known for having a Mad Scientist in them somewhere, wearing a white lab coat and having a laboratory that is required by the Mad Scientist’s Guild to contain at least two Tesla Coils, a Jacob’s Ladder, and a large piece of ill-defined apparatus featuring Vaccum Tubes, Dials, and a Big Switch.
The closest real-life counterpart I’ve been able to find to this is Nikola Tesla, but surely there must have been others… Or is the whole “Mad Scientist” thing purely a fictitious phenomenon, invented by19th (and refined by 20th) century writers out of whole cloth?
Well, I don’t know about mad, but this page refers to the late physicist Nicholas Christofilos as “brilliant but eccentric” and (from a newspaper headline) a “Crazy Greek”; he’s also noted as having been “an amazing personality” (which certainly sounds like a euphemism for “Mad?!? Mad?!? You fools! I’ll show you all!” to me) and explicitly compared to Nikola Tesla.
He did a number of…interesting…things for the government, the biggest of which was Operation Argus, a project to create an artificial radiation belt around Earth by detonating nuclear bombs in space. Secretly detonating nuclear bombs in space. (This was back in 1958, when you could get away with stuff like setting off multiple nuclear explosions in outer space without anybody noticing.) The idea behind all this was that these artificial radiation belts could be used to zap enemy ICBMs.
So:
[ul]
[li]Described as “brilliant but eccentric”.[/li][li]Compared to Tesla.[/li][*]Head honcho scientist on a government project which secretly detonated nuclear warheads in outer space in order to create an artificial radiation belt around Earth to act as an anti-missile shield.[/ul]
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Retro-Futurism over the past couple of days, and I’m increasingly beginning to wonder about Scientists in the 1950s- from advocating smoking cigarettes to suggesting that Atomic Bombs could be used for SimCity style terraforming projects, you have to wonder if they weren’t all spending a bit too much time reading Amazing Stories instead of… well, something that didn’t involve using atomic weapons for earthworks.
Me, I’d rather they WERE reading Amazing Stories and the like, as many did. Lots of science fiction from the period dealt with concerns about fallout and unsavory aspects of nuclear explosions. Edward Teller, who was the driving force behind Operation Plowshare, wasn’t known to be a science fiction reader. I’m glad he and his bunch never did try punching out a harbor in Alaska using a series of fission bombs. Although they DID dump some nuclear waste at the site to watch what happened to it.
My undergrad alma mater, Tulane, once had a faculty member on staff that was a mad scientist. Dr. Robert Heath, a psychiatrist, used to comb the streets of New Orleans for prostitutes, gays, and homeless people. Once he got them in the lab, he would manipulate their brains pleasure centers through electrodes much like scientists elsewhere where doing with rats. His experiments actually produced an intense pleasure sensation so he had plenty of repeat volunteers.
Robert Wood, a respected physicist in Baltimore (he wrote the book Physical Optics, which is still in print and still a pretty good intro to the subject) reportedly used to like walking the streets of Baltimore dressed in black like the Phantom of the Opera. He carried twists of paper containing small lumps of sodium. He used to throw these into puddles to freak out the locals.
He also wrote a book of cartoons and poetry called How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers, which is also still in print.
And he invented that weird practice of putting fake eyes on your chin and looking at your mouth upside-down in the mirror to see a weird little cartoony figure.
Well, you didn’t say they had to be Evil, did you? Wood made flashy light effects and created a new form of (puppet) life. What more do you want?