29 People Who Were Called "Idiots" But Were Actually Right All Along
Too often, the person saying something is impossible, insane or flat-out nonsense gets interrupted by someone doing it. Or perhaps 'often' is the wrong word. Many a genius has spent their life on the wrong end of a joke, or faced consequences far worse (and more painful.) A few, though, do get to have the last laugh. Let's take a look at all of the "crazies" down below who turned out to be right the whole time.
1.
Galileo - he believed the Earth and other planets orbited the Sun, contrary to popular belief that all stars and planets orbited Earth. The Catholic Church called it heresy, and ordered him to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin a trial for his beliefs.
2.
Stanislav Petrov. Though we don't see him as crazy, I'm sure his crewmates thought he was. He directly disobeyed Soviet military protocols and prevented a nuclear war.
3.
Rose McGowan was completely ostracized and blacklisted for talking about Weinstein too early.
4.
John Yudkin. The single scientist who didn't believe the sugar industry's research that demonized fats. Till his death he's adamant that fats weren't the cause of obesity and heart attacks.
5.
During the plague in Moscow there was a priest (or something) DIScouraging people kissing the statue of Maria, as to stop the spreading of the virus. The poor man was burned alive for blasphemy.
6.
Tesla. Edison is still credited with the lightbulb. His last words put it into perspective "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation"
7.
Hemingway talked about the FBI following him prior to his suicide. They thought he was paranoid. Decades later some papers get released, turns out the FBI was following him.
9.
The inventor of dialysis, Dr. Willem Kolff. Although it's hard to blame them, haha. He saw people dying of kidney disease and said "Hey, what if we take all of the blood out of your body, clean it, and put it back in?" (Cleaning your blood is the job of your kidneys, and a dialysis machine is basically an artificial kidney, on the *outside* of your body.) It was a wild idea and he started his work during WWII and had to work with basic materials like orange juice cans, sausage skins, and a washing machine. Many of the first patients died, but they were already going to die painfully. Eventually, he ironed the kinks out and started saving lives.
10.
Charles Darwin. The religious outcry against evolution was engineered by his academic rivals more than from religious resistance. But even now, after all that politics is centuries dead, there remain people who categorically resist demonstrable fact because of it.
12.
There was a wacko looking guy on Oprah who stopped his vanilla presentation to tell the audience that plastic causes cancer, stop using it to store food and water. Oprah cut to commercial and whisked him off the show. Dude was right. BPAs were outed that day, but it took another decade for that info to become public knowledge.
14.
Giordano Bruno was (probably) the first European who proposed the possibility that not only was the universe infinite, but stars were not just points of light in the sky; they could be suns with their own planets, and that some of those planets might even host life. The Catholic Church had him tried for Heresy and had him burned at the stake and his contemporaries though he was completely insane. He had some kooky ideas, but he was absolutely right about the size of the universe and stars being suns with their own planets.
15.
Margaret Dunbar. Her four year old son went missing and one day the cops found him and brought him home. Except it wasn’t her son and everyone tried to gaslight her into believing it was. Well she was right and no one knows what happened to the real Bobby Dunbar to this day.
16.
I don't know that guy's name but he basically from 1541-1542 travelled accross south america. The first european to do so. While he was on his journey he said he saw millions of people and large cities , with a lot of life in them , where today is the amazon rainforest.After he had finished his journey he had told the stories of those cities and about a hundred years later when explorers visited the place there was nothing , no cities , no people , just jungle. So they thought he had made all that up. But modern technology has shown that there might have accually been a lot of cities there , and that those people died out with smallpox and all cities were covered by the jungle within the course of 50 years. So basically people thought he was crazy and made everything up but in modern times its proven that he was right all along.
17.
Will Rogers a humorist when he invented the term "trickle-down" economics as a joke stating that this type of economy would just make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And then we actually implemented it and used the term trickle-down. And Will Rogers was right. The rent has gone though the roof and our salaries have stagnated and we can't afford "The American Dream" anymore.
18.
Martha Mitchell.. She was like part of the reason why it was discovered that Nixon was involved in Watergate. Her husband was part of the Nixon group so she got some inside details. When she wanted to tell the news about the whole scandal, her husband and Nixon men put her in a hotel and restrained her from having any contact with anyone. She was seen as an insane person her husband and Nixon's men even managed to convince the psychiatrists that she was out of her mind. Actually there's a phenomenon in psychology which was named after her a.k.a the Martha Mitchell Effect
19.
Heinrich Schliemann. He 100% believed that ancient Troy had really existed. So he armed himself with a copy of the Iliad, and actually managed to find and excavate the city. He'd told everyone and their sister that Troy was a real place for 40 years before he found it, and everyone thought he was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Not so much, it turns out.
20.
Remember the government accountant in George W Bush’s presidency who said the war in Afghanistan would cost a billion dollars a month and he was fired? Well, he was right. It was 300 million dollars per day for 20 years.
21.
Dr. Atkins. When his first book 'The New Diet Revolution' came out, he was mocked and ridiculed for thinking that refined sugars, flour, and starch caused the glycemic index to skyrocket which led to your body storing fat. When he died people thought he died from his own diet. Keto-acidosis and how you can lose weight by reducing your glycemic index was largely his research. It was later stolen and copied and called 'The Zone Diet' and 'The Caveman Diet' and 'The Paleo Diet' which were all based on his work.
22.
All the people that said the NSA/CIA was spying on us for years. Thanks to edward Snowden we now know that was true and it was so much so that the NSA had built back doors in pretty much every single electronic device that exsists all the way down to the network switch level on cisco switches and the internet backbone through AT&T network hubs. The fact that there wasnt mass revolt after that information was released kinda blew my mind.
23.
Eisenhower. Re: The military–industrial complex. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
24.
Clair Patterson-he was made out to be crazy by giant oil companies bc he tested ice cores in the Arctic and figured out that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, the water, and our bodies was extremely high and caused by leaded gasoline. He petitioned Congress for years to make it illegal to add lead to gasoline, but the corporations kept getting him shut down because they used lead as an anti-knock agent for internal combustion engines. Ironically, lead was causing everyone else to go crazy because it is shaped like a neurotransmitter and blocks receptors causing insanity, similarly to what mercury does, and many employees of the oil companies had gone mad. After decades of battling the oil companies, he finally got his way and lead was removed from gasoline. Since then, the amount of lead in the atmosphere and I’m living things has decreased dramatically. He also created the first truly “clean room.”
25.
Boltzman spend his life trying to prove his formula but ended up commiting suicide because none of his collegues believed him. Now, his formula is basically the 'amen' in thermodynamics.
26.
MrBeast infiltrated the YouTube market early. Mastered it. Making millions on millions a decade later at age 23. He bet on new media, looked crazy for a while but in the end won big. I understand to most he’s not a historical figure but as a marketing and digital media expert—he’s a pioneer in my book. He wrote the playbook. Plus there’s a typo in the question haha.
27.
Lord Kitchener (Horacio Herbert Kitchener) Secretary State of War for the British Army. At the onset of WW1, everyone thought the war would end very quickly, either going one way or the other. Kitchener was one of the few people to envision a long war, and to prepare accordingly, even though the British government actively hampered many of his efforts (even though he was a war hero)
28.
Mitt Romney and his comment about Russia. I voted against him, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right about Russia.
29.
Henry A Wallace was Roosevelt's running mate and vice president in his 3rd term in office but was dropped from the ticket in the 4th in favor of Truman. Wallace was correct on a lot of issues manifesting in America that are still here today, race, education, and what happens to society unfer unregulated capitalism. In many ways Wallace's story mirrors the story of every single progressive the democratic party has tried to run in the 20th century. Rhetoric is fine but don't go after corporate greed. Truman and Wallace could not have been more different. If Wallace had stayed as running mate and vp at the time of FDR's death, its possible to imagine we would be living in a totally different world.
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