Publisher's Synopsis
Publishers Weekly Best Summer Reads
Overturn everything you knew about history's greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there's a finer line between "genius" and "idiot" than we've previously known.
- Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, believed that he could communicate with the undead and built the world's very first hotline to heaven: the Spirit Phone.
- Marie and Pierre Curie, famous for discovering radioactivity, slept next to a lump of radioactive material for years and strapped it to their arms to watch it burn them in real-time.
- Lord Byron, acclaimed British poet, literally took a bear with him to university.
- Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion, but he also looked up at the sun without eye protection. The result? Three days of blindness.
- Tesla, whose scientific work led to the invention of the AC unit, fell in love with a pigeon.
Edison's Ghosts is filled with examples of the so-called best of humanity doing, to put it bluntly, some really dumb shit. You'll discover stories that deserve to be told but never are: the hilarious, regrettable, and downright bafflingly lesser-known achievements that never made it into our history books, until now.
