A lot of things that we take for granted were not really received with open arms when they were suggested. Even worse, many scientists, inventors, or thinkers, whom we now revere as visionaries, were actually mocked, discredited, and even punished just for their ideas.
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Sinéad O’Connor. Was villified when she ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL for child abuse and criticizing the Catholic Church.Over the following decades we realized how devastatingly right she was about the whole thing.
Kotaku Wamura, mayor of a town in Japan who spent decades of taxpayer money developing a seawall to defend against tsunamis. During his whole career he was ridiculed for the expenditure and he died before it ever payed off. Then in 2011 it saved the whole town.
Jimmy Carter. He was right about promoting energy independence and transitioning from usage away from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy (and he was a former nuclear engineer as well). His stance back in the ’70s holds up extremely well, especially in this day and age.
Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality, which was considered illegal at the time. Turing’s work in breaking the Enigma code during World War II was pivotal in Allied victory. He is now celebrated for his contributions to computing and artificial intelligence.
Patricia Stallings comes to mind.Convicted of poisoning her first child, gave birth in prison (kid got taken away) and the kid also dies. Instead of poisoning it was now found it was a genetic defect that had similar effects as poisoning with antifreeze.
We should all, collectively, thank a number of other medical thinkers of the time who went against the grain and decided to give Joseph Lister’s ideas a shot. Marcus Beck, a consultant surgeon at University College Hospital, made sure toinclude his ideasin newer editions of medical textbooks.
Monica Lewinsky. She was a 20-y-o White House intern who got taken advantage of. Then the media crucified her for it.
Courtney Love. I’m referring specifically to the fact that she called out Harvey Weinstein publicly long before what we know now, and everyone kind of just dismissed her.
Rose McGowan for calling out Harvey Weinstein.
Barry Marshall (and also Robin Warren his co-researcher). Forever, the cause of peptic ulcers was believed to be stress, spicy food and too much acid production. They believed it was actually of bacterial origin. No one believed them, they were ridiculed because the belief was that bacteria couldn’t survive in the acidic environment of the stomach. Not until Barry took a cocktail of H. pylori bacteria, which caused him to have massive inflammation of the stomach which was found to be colonized with the bacteria, but a course of antibiotics later and it was gone. One Nobel prize later and now the treatment of peptic ulcers is turned on its head and instead of months or years of discomfort it can often be sorted with a week or two course of anti-biotics.
Pearl Jam war with Ticket master.In1994, American rock band Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, claiming that Ticketmaster has a “virtually absolute monopoly on the distribution of tickets to concerts” and attempted to book its tour only at venues that did not use Ticketmaster. However, no action was taken on Ticketmaster.
The Deep-sea exploration community warning OceanGate against ocean tourism. OceanGate basically told them to mind their business.
John Snow. He tried to remove the handle of a water pump in London that was drawing its water downstream from a sewage pipe People who drew water from the pump caught cholera.
George Carlin. People used to think he was a hippy spouting off idealistic governmental propaganda. The man was a prophet.
Richard Jewell was blasted as being the Atlanta Olympic Bomber when he was really just a guy helping people out down there.He deserved better.
Nicolaus Copernicus, theorized that the planets actually circled the sun instead of the other way around. The church initially accepted heliocentricacy but banned his views in 1600s.
Corey Feldman exposing all the pedos in Hollywood.
Stanley Prusiner. Everyone who was anyone in science knew that proteins couldn’t be an infectious agent. They weren’t even alive! He suffered so much mockery and scepticism… until the mad cow disease, and kuru etc, were found to be precisely what he had described.
The journalists who maintained Lance Armstrong was doping when he was winning the Tour de France. I remember they were mocked because they admittedly went to extremes hunting for evidence. I remember reports of them sifting through Armstrong’s trash.Lance Armstrong was a great story, a testicular cancer survivor who beat the disease and went on to set the record for most Tour de France victories (was it 7?). He was untouchable. Anyone contesting he was cheating was shamed. I remember the journalists investigating him were mostly French, so they were dismissed because they were sour that an American was breaking the Tour de France records. I remember other Tour winners such as Greg Le Mond and Floyd Landis also contesting that Armstrong was cheating, and both being silenced/shamed. Landis had tested positive himself for doping so he wasn’t considered a reliable source. I remember with Le Mond they dug into his history and brought up child abuse he suffered as a result of him making claims against Armstrong.Turns out they were all right.
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Anita Hill. I called my father as I was upset no one believed her. I knew what I was experiencing in the work place. She is my hero. Because of her the corporate company I worked for started promoting women into management roles. In my career as I am now retired, I was the first woman manager in four different locations, all different corporations. I didn’t have a degree but had talent in my field. I attended a state conference where other managers in my field attended. I was the only women and didn’t realize it til the next year’s conference when another women entered the room. I was in that room because of my talent and until someone opened that door I couldn’t go in. Anita unlocked that door.
Remember when people thought Marie Curie’s work was ‘too dangerous’? Now we can’t imagine medicine and technology without her discoveries.
Dr. John Leal, the first man to chlorinate drinking water to kill germs. Only, chlorine is a deadly poison, so he did so secretly for a couple months at first. The judge was incredulous that a man would poison the water supply from which his own son drank, but Leal said that it was the safest water in the world, and he was right. Suitably diluted, the chlorine does no notable damage to humans worlds of hurt to bacteria.
Mitt Romney during his presidential run said Putin was the biggest threat.
One of the lesser known ones is Hellen Keller. Her story of overcoming her disabilities as a young woman was often taught to children, but her adult life was largely excluded because of her “radical” ideas at the time which involved pushing for black rights, anti-lynching laws, early support of birth control, supporting liberal socialism, and she even co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nan Briton had an affair with US president Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s. Harding died of a heart attack in 1923, and Briton tried to sue for child support. She was ridiculed in court. In 2015, Ancestry.com did a DNA analysis on Harding’s and Briton’s descendants. Nan was telling the truth.
Patrice Lumumba. The United Nations labeled him as an unreasonable, unprincipled madman. In reality he just wanted his country’s independence from Belgium because they had been torturing and oppressing the natives there since the days of king Leopold.
William H. Seward, arranged the purchase of the Alaska territory from Russia for $7 Million dollars. The media and politician’s of the era termed it “Seward’s Folly” “Seward’s icebox” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.”
Van Halen and the brown M&Ms.A lot of people thought they were just being a******s when they had a clause in their contract that required a bowl of M&Ms to be filled but with all the brown ones removed.This was actually their way to check if the people setting up the venue for lighting, pyro, electrical, etc, actually did all the work. If they had the bowl without brown ones, it meant the venue was trustworthy and safety precautions were followed. If there were any brown ones, it meant they cut corners somewhere and that meant lives at risk.
Johnny Lyden when he said on the radio that Jimmy Saville was dodgy.
The “leave Britney alone” guy, Chris Crocker.Loggerdon:Yeah, I remember laughing at him as a clown but later felt guilty after her story came to light.
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Charles B McVay, the captain of the USS Indianapolis at the time it was sunk. Scapegoated and blamed for the tragedy because the Navy totally s**t the bed left and right and needed a fall guy. He was exonerated decades after taking his own life…
Martin Luther King was hated in his own time and died with a negative favorability rating.
Svante Arrhenius.During his PhD research in the 1880’s he theorized that crystalline salts dissolved in water to form pairs of charged ions. For example, sodium chloride (common table salt) dissolved in water to form positively charged sodium ions, and negatively charged chloride ions. His PhD dissertation didn’t impress his professors, and he received low marks. Their reaction was something like “You think that salt dissolves in water to form ions of SODIUM?! A metal that reacts violently with water?! And chlorine GAS? Are you serious? GTFO!” He later received the 1903 Nobel Prize in chemistry for this groundbreaking work.
Wrote an Econ paper in 2007 about the housing market crashing and was told the housing market never crashes.
Lars Ulrich. Metallica’s drummer. Lars was right. Digital music made it challenging for bands, small or big, to make a living. Top that off with predatory practices like merch cuts from venues.
Georg Cantor, a 19th-century German mathematician. He was the mathematician who proved that the cardinality of the real numbers was uncountably infinite (rather than countably infinite like the natural numbers and the sets in bijection with the naturals), now a very commonly known fact even among undergraduates in mathematics. Essentially, the real numbers are a “greater” infinite than the natural numbers ({1,2,3,4,…}). Many mathematicians of the day rejected his proof and infinite set theories, notably of which included Henry Poincaré (who created the Poincaré conjecture, the only solved problem among the 7 Millenium Prize problems) and Leopold Kronecker (who the Kronecker-Delta is named after). Funnily enough, Cantor’s legacy lives on to this day because his Set Theory ended up being the foundation for the vast majority of modern mathematics as we know it.
the guy who came up with the theory of Pangaea and continental drift
The Duke lacrosse team. They were proven innocent, yet only one reporter apologized for writing a story about their ‘guilt’. The accused received a large amount of money for their troubles, but the coach had trouble finding work. ESPN did a 30 for 30 on the Duke lacrosse team.The three players who were investigated for the crime ended up filing suit against Duke university, Duke settled for a undisclosed sum (rumored to be $60 million). Then the three players sued the City of Durham and the Police department. That lawsuit was settled after seven years for approximately $50,000. One of the players earned a law degree and is currently a lawyer who works with the Innocence Project. One of the players graduated from Duke and went on to earn an MBA. The third player graduated from Loyola. Nifong was removed from office, disbarred, and ended up serving one day in jail. The dancer who accused the players, Crystal Magnum is serving a prison sentence for second degree murder.
Ted Kaczynski. He’d also be vilified today due to his brutal methods. But it’s undeniable at this point that he predicted accurately the dystopia we now live in.
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