You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [33]
Two things. One, Churchill wasn’t treated with penicillin. Two, Fleming wasn’t the guy who discovered it. Just some asshole.
Who actually discovered it?
North African tribesmen had been using penicillin for thousands of years by the time Fleming was born. Also, in 1897 Ernest Duchesne used the mold Penicillum glaucoma to cure typhoid in guinea pigs, which was about the stupidest waste of time in the history of science but still proof that he understood the mold’s healing properties.
Other scientists at the time didn’t take him seriously, due to his age and strange preoccupation with guinea pigs, so he never received a patent. He died about ten years later, from a disease that would have been completely treatable with penicillin, and he was survived by his healthy, yet totally indifferent, guinea pigs.
Even when Fleming did accidentally discover penicillin years later, he didn’t think it could be used to help anyone, so he moved on. Meanwhile, scientists Howard Florey, Norman Heatley, Andrew Moyer, and Ernst Chain disagreed and worked with penicillin until they’d mastered it.
So even though Fleming wasn’t the first person to discover penicillin and didn’t actually believe penicillin was useful, he will forever go down in history as a penicillin-inventing, Winston Churchill-saving genius.
3. ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
For being the man behind the telephone, Bell sure loved deaf people. His wife was deaf, his mother was deaf, and he was even Helen Keller’s favorite teacher. With this near obsession with deaf people, it’s amazing that Bell found time to invent the telephone. Wait, not amazing. Impossible. That’s the one.
Who actually invented it?
In 1860, an Italian named Antonio Meucci first demonstrated his working telephone (though he called it the teletrofono, because Italian is a ridiculous language). In 1871, he filed a temporary patent, but in 1874 he failed to send in the ten dollars necessary to renew his patent, because he was sick, poor, and Italian.
Two years later, Bell registered his telephone patent. Meucci attempted to sue, of course, but when he tried to retrieve the original sketches and plans he sent to a lab at Western Union, the records, amazingly, had disappeared. Where was Bell working at this time? The very same Western Union lab where Meucci swore he sent his original sketches.
Did Bell, given his convenient position at Western Union, destroy Meucci’s records and claim the telephone as his own invention? It’s difficult to say, though it has been argued fairly convincingly that, yes, of course he did. Absolutely. Most notably, by us just now. It makes sense, if you look at the facts: Bell already had a number of important inventions under his belt; it isn’t unreasonable to assume that he got greedy and didn’t want to see anyone else succeed. Further, who is Bell even calling? His deaf wife and mother? Bullshit.
2. ALBERT EINSTEIN
When you hear the name Einstein, you undoubtedly think, “He discovered relativity,” or “He came up with that E = mc2 equation,” or “He was a sex maniac.” Only one of those things is true. (It’s the sex maniac part.)
Who actually invented it?
Henri Poincaré was the foremost expert on relativity in the late nineteenth century, having published thirty respected books and over five hundred papers on the subject, which is strange, because Einstein’s famous On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which contains his theories on relativity, doesn’t mention Poincaré once. As a matter of fact, Einstein does not reference, footnote,