When we think of genius, we picture groundbreaking inventions and timeless ideas. Yet even the brightest minds harbored some truly bizarre beliefs, from outlawing sign language to predicting the apocalypse. Below, we dive into ten strange convictions championed by brilliant people.
Bizarre Beliefs: The Hidden Side of Greatness
These odd convictions show that brilliance often walks hand‑in‑hand with eccentricity, reminding us that great thinkers are, after all, only human.
10 Alexander Graham Bell Hated Sign Language
Bell’s mother was deaf, a fact that steered his career toward inventing ways for the hearing impaired to speak. His father even helped develop “Visible Speech,” a system of symbols meant to teach deaf children how to vocalize words they’d never heard.
Instead of embracing sign language, Bell launched a nationwide campaign against it. He argued that sign language created a separate deaf culture, isolating its users from mainstream society, encouraging deaf‑only marriages, and even fostering a new “deaf variety” of humanity.
In his 1884 pamphlet Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, Bell condemned sign language as a foreign tongue that split the species. He advocated banning it outright, outlawing deaf teachers, and using Visible Speech to assimilate deaf children into conventional education.
9 Isaac Newton’s Apocalyptic Predictions
Newton is famed for physics and calculus, but he also poured countless hours into alchemy and biblical prophecy. He produced roughly 4,500 pages of biblical analysis, convinced that Scripture held the ultimate key to the universe.
From this exhaustive study, Newton concluded the world would meet its end in the year 2060. After the cataclysm, he imagined a thousand‑year reign of saints who would return to guide humanity, and he even saw himself among those saintly rulers.
8 Carl Linnaeus’s Mermaids
Carl Linnaeus, the 18th‑century botanist who gave us the binomial naming system, also had a flair for the fantastical. In early editions of his seminal Systema Naturae, he listed the kraken—assigning it the scientific name Microcosmus marinus—even though he noted he’d never actually seen the creature.
His mythic interests didn’t stop there. Linnaeus claimed to have examined a mermaid kept in a Leiden museum, allegedly sourced from Brazil. According to his description, the mermaid’s diet consisted of tiny fish and bits of bread.
7 Aristotle’s Ideas On Women
Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, often praised male superiority. He bolstered his stance with what he called “bizarre evidence.” While conceding that women could run households and were a step above children and slaves, he insisted they could never equal men.
He pointed to Sparta, where women enjoyed relative power, arguing that the result was uncivilized and disastrous. Aristotle claimed biology dictated this outcome, labeling women as an “incomplete, deformed version of men.”
6 Carl Jung’s Summoning Of The Self
In 1889, Jung began studying Miss S.W., a 15‑year‑old who experienced somnambulistic episodes. While asleep, she would channel spirits—most often her grandfather—her pulse slowed, and her eyes ceased responding to stimuli.
Jung attended her seances for years and concluded that occult phenomena offered a direct portal into the deepest layers of a person’s “self.” He argued that much of personality formation occurs beneath conscious awareness, and that these hidden “complexes” could surface during occult experiences.
5 Robert FitzRoy’s Dinosaurs
Robert FitzRoy, credited with pioneering modern weather forecasting and founding the Met Office, led a life as dramatic as the seas he sailed. While his meteorological sketches still hold up against satellite imagery, his personal theories were decidedly… unconventional.
During the HMS Beagle voyage, FitzRoy clashed with Charles Darwin over evolution. Rejecting Darwin’s ideas, he proposed a wildly different cause for the dinosaur extinction: Noah’s Ark allegedly had doors too small to accommodate the massive reptiles, sealing their fate.
4 Henry Ford’s Slavery
Beyond Ford’s well‑known fascination with Nazi Germany, his factories also operated what journalist George S. Schuyler described as an “industrial plantation.” In the 1930s, Ford’s Detroit plant employed slave labor sourced from concentration‑camp prisoners.
Letters unearthed in 2003 between Edsel Ford and the company’s French headquarters reveal that the Fords were aware of the Nazi labor pool. Subsequent archival work confirmed that Ford Motor Company, alongside Siemens and IG Farbe, used slave labor from Auschwitz and other camps.
3 Tesla And Eugenics
Nikola Tesla, now a pop‑culture icon, also harbored unsettling ideas. In a 1935 article for Liberty magazine, he advocated a future where “survival of the fittest” was taken to an extreme.
Tesla argued that by 2100 humanity should sterilize anyone deemed “unfit” for the species—specifically the mentally ill, the criminally convicted, and anyone otherwise undesirable. He believed forced sterilization would safeguard the human race’s continuation.
2 Charles Dickens And His Healing Abilities
During the 1830s mesmerism craze, Dickens became a fervent believer in the power of magnetic fluid. He claimed to have healed an injured friend by mesmerizing him, a skill he learned from his close associate, Dr. John Elliotson.
After Elliotson’s reputation crumbled, Dickens defended his friend and adopted the mesmeric techniques himself. He practiced on family members, attempted to ease Augusta de la Rue’s chronic headaches in 1845, and even claimed to have aided friend John Leech after a head injury in 1849.
1 Pythagoras’s Cult
Pythagoras’s legacy is often reduced to the famous theorem, yet his followers adhered to a labyrinth of odd rules. They forbade burial in wool cloth, shunned eating sea anemones, rams, oxen, and even the hearts or wombs of animals, fearing those parts might house former human souls.
Beans were especially taboo, as Pythagoreans believed souls traveled through beans to be reborn. Additional prohibitions covered breaking bread, putting on a left shoe first, traveling on public roads, picking up dropped objects, looking into a mirror beside a light, and stepping over a crossbar. Some accounts even suggest prospective members endured five years of silence before admission.
Why These Bizarre Beliefs Matter
From anti‑sign‑language crusades to apocalyptic calendars, these convictions reveal the human side of genius. Understanding them helps us appreciate that even the most brilliant minds can be swayed by the strange currents of their time.