People say a lot of stupid stuff. And we judge them for it. But every now and then, over time, enough evidence emerges to prove us all wrong and redeem even the wildest statements.
Interested in these cases, Redditor TheCheeryStranger recently asked other platform users, "What 'crazy' person in history was right the whole time?" and everyone immediately started sending in their answers.
From Ernest Hemingway talking about the FBI tailing him to Galileo Galilei being trialed by the Church for his heretic claim that the Earth revolves around the sun, here are some of the most interesting ones.
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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. Clair Patterson… a f**king hero.
He also created the first truly “clean room.”
Sinead O’Connor - she was vilified for ripping up a photo of the pope to protest child abuse within the Catholic Church. Spoiler alert - the Catholic Church was covering up child abuse.
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.
Rose McGowan was completely ostracized and blacklisted for talking about Weinstein too early.
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"
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.
Lisa Bonet. She was vilified for hating Cosby in the 80s. Who’s the villain now?
He didnt like when she was naked in a movie. He had her character denise leave diffrent world because she was pregnabt in real life
Corey Feldman talking about child sex abuse in Hollywood.
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.
Yup, my mum read his book Pure, White and Deadly many years ago. People thought he was a conspiracy nut, because *surely* fat in food leads to fat in arteries. Tell that to the people who live in the Arctic Circle and traditionally eat large amounts of seal blubber. To be honest though, I hate this crusade against sugar we're now having. In the UK everything is packed with artificial sweeteners. I'd rather have real sugar, in small quantities as a treat than eat sweeteners regularly. There's emerging evidence that they do damage to your gut microbiome.
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.
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.
The fact anyone voted twice for the administration that implemented trickle-down economics still shocks me, and I was alive for both times Reagan was voted in... And old enough to cry both times, too.
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.
Rutherford B Hayes. Not necessarily viewed as crazy, but largely viewed as a bad or useless president.
"This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations."
Said that in the late 1800's.
He was POTUS 1876-81, after a very nasty election (think: the 2016 of its day). The qoute can be found in "The Diary & Letters" of same, published in the edition I've seen in 1920-something.
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.
Aww, the good old times where the church had much more power and religious beliefs were more common than nowadays.
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.
Craig Ferguson having empathy for Britney Spears in his 2007 monologue.
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.
At least former Halliburton CEO, Cheney, got his company no-bid contracts to help rebuild Iraq.
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.
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
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.
This should be more commonly known. I didn't learn about the roots of the rejection of evolution until I was in a college level anthropology course. I always assumed it was a religious objection. Just proves that religion isn't qualified to know what it's upset about.
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.
Galileo knew to tread lightly. His colleague, Giordano Bruno, was executed via burning at the stake for believing in heliocentricity.
Rachel Caron found that DDT was weakening the shells of bird eggs and contributing to the decline in the bald eagle population. She faced quite a bit of backlash from publishing her book "Silent Spring" detailing her research on the topic.
Likely a typo, but I appreciate the correction. I didn't know her name and am glad I can look her up correctly now!
Load More Replies... I can remember in the 70's all of us kids riding our bikes in the smoke coming out of the mosquito trucks thinking we were having a fun ole time. Ignorance really is bliss.
THiS! Sitting at the bus stop as the planes buzzed felt like feet from our heads and no where to run. We just sat and breathed and accepted.
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I'm 78, I read her book many years ago. It was very prophetic. Of course the polluting businesses even today hate her. More plastic, more pesticides, more coal and oil burning mean more $$$ for the industrialists and their paid lackeys in congress,
I read "Silent Spring" when I was 10 years old. And it terrified me. And made me who I am today.
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hmm, I can't believe I never heard of weakening bird eggshells, I would have thought that would come up at some point in my weird studies... {The powerful insecticide DDT was widely used in the 1940s and 1950s to curb mosquito populations until it was discovered that the chemical caused thinning of eggshells in some birds. This resulted in a rapid decline in bird populations} wow! Learn something new every day!
Rachel Carson is a case study in my IB ESS class. I love her and really want to read her book.
I read "Silent Spring" when I was 10 years old. And it terrified me. And made me who I am today. Her book should be required reading for everyone on Earth.
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DDT also caused Massive health effects in the local farming community. Once talked to an older man from one of these communities that joked how the entire town had 'mush thyroids' (malfunctioning gland that controls your entire bodies system) because of the decades of DDT use. It was startling.
I assume you mean Rachel Carson. She succeeded in getting DDT banned. This resulted in millions of people in Africa dying of malaria. Her research has since been debunked -- later scientists were not able to find any correlation between DDT use and thinning of bird egg shells. It is quite likely that she doomed millions of people to death for unproven doom-crying.
We can instead categorize her as thought to be crazy, then believed, then realized, yes she was crazy and made stuff up. From my recollection, she quoted studies where researchers would submerge the eggs in DDT. If you submerge an egg in vinegar for some time it will kill the chick inside as well. Here's a good article: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/health/05iht-sntier.1.6003787.html
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And DDT was banned causing huge number of deaths in the tropics from various flying inserts
I remember we used to run behind the bug truck, through the fog of bug spray! Ugh, dumb choices kids make and parents had no clue about!
I love that book. Its not recognized enough...should be compulsory reading in every school on the planet.
Question what life form kills more humans per year by thousandfold than any other? MOSQUITO. When they eliminated DDT millions have died yearly ever since. Fing mosquito nets are useless. I'm Alaskan and my father was a bushpilot untill he died at 94 years old. He crop dusted with DDT and every other chemical in production. No mask no nothing dumping bales of fertilizer laced with b ug killer. I started helping him at ten years old, He even wrote the manual for HELICOPTER SPRAYING much more effective method. Green weenies mean well but wait until this warming solar cycle ends. You will be praying for warming. I'll never forget you whackos wanting Joe Ussibelli to donate coal powder to the government to drop on the North Pole ice to melt it to cool the planet. Whack jobs.... the arrogance of man to think he/she can control the climate is laughable. Enjoy paying the bill at the pump for your sage manipulation of the weather. JERKS. I BURN NAT GAS.
Have visited wildlife sanctuary in Wells Maine. Pristine and natural beauty .
Eliminating DDT resulted in a great increase in malaria deaths in Africa and countries elsewhere.
DDT is still present in our environment in minute amounts. But most bird species have recovered in spades. Today's environmental disaster is the amount of microplastic found everywhere from the deep ocean to arctic core samples.
Artic core samples are from 1000 plus ft deep centuries before plastic. ET must have put it there. Rocket scientist no doubt
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Again, People didn't think her crazy. Some people didn't believe her, but most did, which is why DDT was eventually banned.
I grew up on military bases and every day at, say 3 p.m., they would send the trucks through the neighborhoods spraying DDT. It was strongly suggested that you be inside while they sprayed. We didn't have any problems with mosquitos but didn't know that it affected other wildlife.
We used to run through the DDT fog behind the trucks at Scott AFB... untill I didn't see a car and knocked out my front teeth. No other health problems, my pop flew DDT runs for the locust in North Africa and crop dusted, lived until 94 flew daily until two weeks before he started giving ST Peter flight training.
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We were out playing and working in the fields when they sprayed DDT. Back in the days of lead gasoline. And paint. And, I'm surprised any of are still alive.
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."
And no one talks about Eisenhower's 99% taxation plan on businesses unless they increased wages, offered more benefits, gave payed time off, etc.
Carrie Nation of the Temperance/Prohibition movement
She has been ridiculed and lambasted by history as a kooky, prudish anti-alcohol crusader. But she was actually a diligent progressive activist working through a proto-social justice lens.
Her beef wasn't with alcohol, but rather with distilleries and suppliers flooding small towns with enormous quantities of cheap, low-quality liquor with the explicit intent of turning emotionally devastated WWI veterans into drunkards for profit. (The knock-on effects of that campaign included rampant domestic violence and poverty.)
Gal was working to uplift the most vulnerable people and is only remembered for making a show of smashing bottles.
Anyone who publicly tries to uplift the vulnerable will be made a mockery by the powerful; it's not within their agenda to share power.
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.
I'm likely in a minority but I really don't give any f***s if people want to waste time listening into my daily life/phone/emails etc - all they're going to get is me talking c**p with mates, my husband and my kids, meme wars that go on for months at a time, the insane number of cake decorating videos I watch and my true crime obsession. I don't see some government employed person bored oot their tits seeing the drivel people talk as an invasion of privacy - and if snooping on folks interactions prevents some big disaster like the twin towers then I think it's worth it. And I kinda like the fact I'll mention wanting a new mattress and then getting every ad directed towards mattresses, it reminds me to look for them when I'd likely otherwise forget as my brain is like Swiss cheese
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.
Morgan Robertson.
In 1898 he published a story about a ship named the Titan, a fictional ship, that sinks after hitting an iceberg. Allegedly (and I can’t find any proof of this) it was initially dismissed for being too outlandish.
14 years later, the Titanic sinks in an eerily similar fashion. Robertson dismissed all claims of being psychic, and was just familiar with ships of the time and their flaws.
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.
The explorer was Francisco de Orellana. The YouTube link for the BBC documentary, Unnatural Histories, is https://youtu.be/ihvySe6yROE
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.
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I'm surprised Johnny Rotten isn't on the list. Banned by the BBC in 1978 for calling out Jimmy Saville as a predator.
Yeah, there's even an audio recording of him calling Jimmy out (https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/watch-johnny-rotten-call-out-jimmy-savile-decades-before-netflix.html), but the BBC refused to air it back then. I couldn't stand the man (Johnny) when he was with the Pistols and he's still a bit of the old "mad lad", but his recent interviews and comments have been spot-on.
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Thor Heyerdahl. That guy said that it is completely possible to build a raft in South America (I think it was in Peru) and use it to sail to Philiphines. Many experts didn't believe him, so he made a party of six or seven guys, built the raft and made the journey.
Many more scientists. On top of my head, Barbara McClintock, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweis (especially Ignaz Semmelweis), Frances Oldham Kelsey and likely many more. Some of them were proven right in their lifetime and received high honors, some of them didn't live to see fruits of their labour.
Semmelweis! I was trying to remember his name. Yes, he should have been up there.
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I'm waiting for the time that John Anthony West is validated about his findings on the age of the Pyramids and The Sphinx.- 14,000 years. Of course people called him crazy, but his research is based on Geology, not Archeology. As I see it, and my Geology prof agreed, Geology is an exact science. Archeology is interpretive, and at times, makes things either "fit", or disappear. Interesting dilemma.
Just because you're right doesn't mean you aren't crazy. And some of these people may not have been crazy, but neither were they right.
Came here to say the similar, a handful of these people were considered crazy anyway, and were just considered more crazy or the crazy label was (very very wrongly) weaponised against them, as a result of their beliefs or statements, despite them being correct. Sadly all too common in Hollywood especially, and far too effective against women.
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It's sad how many of these people were negatively affected by religion and religious views of others. And it's still happening. It's like we never learn to stop allowing religion to dictate our government or people's lives just in general.
Please change keto-acidosis to ketosis. They are NOT the same thing. Keto-acidosis is life threatening.
Alfred Wegener was thought to be crazy when he presented his theory on continental drift
Denying continental drift always blew my mind. What, did europe and north america both independently evolve foxes and bears from the first single-celled organisms? Clearly the continents were joined for most of earth's history. I remember clearly as a 5 year old in kindergarten looking at a globe of earth and saying "hey I see south america fits against africa". It's so obvious it's painful.
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Actually, yes. The original Salk vaccine needed boosters, and so did the smallpox vaccine.
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I'm surprised Johnny Rotten isn't on the list. Banned by the BBC in 1978 for calling out Jimmy Saville as a predator.
Yeah, there's even an audio recording of him calling Jimmy out (https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/watch-johnny-rotten-call-out-jimmy-savile-decades-before-netflix.html), but the BBC refused to air it back then. I couldn't stand the man (Johnny) when he was with the Pistols and he's still a bit of the old "mad lad", but his recent interviews and comments have been spot-on.
Load More Replies... Thor Heyerdahl. That guy said that it is completely possible to build a raft in South America (I think it was in Peru) and use it to sail to Philiphines. Many experts didn't believe him, so he made a party of six or seven guys, built the raft and made the journey.
Many more scientists. On top of my head, Barbara McClintock, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Ignaz Semmelweis (especially Ignaz Semmelweis), Frances Oldham Kelsey and likely many more. Some of them were proven right in their lifetime and received high honors, some of them didn't live to see fruits of their labour.
Semmelweis! I was trying to remember his name. Yes, he should have been up there.
Load More Replies... I'm waiting for the time that John Anthony West is validated about his findings on the age of the Pyramids and The Sphinx.- 14,000 years. Of course people called him crazy, but his research is based on Geology, not Archeology. As I see it, and my Geology prof agreed, Geology is an exact science. Archeology is interpretive, and at times, makes things either "fit", or disappear. Interesting dilemma.
Just because you're right doesn't mean you aren't crazy. And some of these people may not have been crazy, but neither were they right.
Came here to say the similar, a handful of these people were considered crazy anyway, and were just considered more crazy or the crazy label was (very very wrongly) weaponised against them, as a result of their beliefs or statements, despite them being correct. Sadly all too common in Hollywood especially, and far too effective against women.
Load More Replies... It's sad how many of these people were negatively affected by religion and religious views of others. And it's still happening. It's like we never learn to stop allowing religion to dictate our government or people's lives just in general.
Please change keto-acidosis to ketosis. They are NOT the same thing. Keto-acidosis is life threatening.
Alfred Wegener was thought to be crazy when he presented his theory on continental drift
Denying continental drift always blew my mind. What, did europe and north america both independently evolve foxes and bears from the first single-celled organisms? Clearly the continents were joined for most of earth's history. I remember clearly as a 5 year old in kindergarten looking at a globe of earth and saying "hey I see south america fits against africa". It's so obvious it's painful.
Load More Replies... Actually, yes. The original Salk vaccine needed boosters, and so did the smallpox vaccine.
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