10 Inventors Who Were Terrible People

Inventors are some of the most revered people in history. I know whenever I’m hungry, I thank Duane Roberts for creating the microwaveable burrito.

But many of the more famous and lauded innovators in history, though geniuses, weren’t very smart in their personal lives. From adhering to fascism to being a terrible parent, here are 10 inventors throughout history who weren’t as great as their creations.

Related: 10 Inventions and Theories Made by Women but Credited to Men

10 Erwin Schrodinger

While not an inventor in the traditional sense of the word, you know about Erwin Schrodinger’s greatest accomplishment: Schrodinger’s Cat. Created by the famous physicist, this theory states that if a cat is put in a closed box, it can be both considered dead and alive, making it a paradox.

Schrodinger is one of the few men on this list to actually commit a tangible crime. In 1935, The Irish Times published a report that while tutoring a 14-year-old girl, the 35-year-old man began grooming her. By the time she was 17, he had impregnated her and forced her to have an abortion that left her sterile for the rest of her life. Maybe he should have been in that box and not the cat.^[1]

9 Max Keith

During World War 2, the German branch of the Coca-Cola Company had a huge problem: There was no more Coke. When the United States officially went to war with Germany in 1941, Coca-Cola headquarters cut off all contact with Coca-Cola Deutschland.

Company president Max Keith had the fanta-stic idea to create a new drink using only products that were available in war-torn Germany. This included sugar beet, whey, and apple pomace. Or, as Keith called them, “leftovers of leftovers.” The drink sold well throughout the 1940s, not just because it was the only drink available but because it was also a popular way to sweeten soups and stews while sugar was rationed.

Obviously, Fanta has grown beyond the confines of Nazi Germany, but there’s no way to deny the fact that Keith was, of course, a Nazi.^[2]

8 Guglielmo Marconi

This Italian engineer is best known as the inventor of the modern radio. While his work in the field of wireless technology is undeniable, he’s probably lucky to be remembered for his 1909 Nobel Prize and not for his ensuing political career. Which, as a reminder, was in Italy. In the 1930s. Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

Marconi officially joined the National Fascist Party in 1923 and was appointed as a member of the Fascist Grand Council by Benito Mussolini himself. Luckily, Marconi died in 1937 before Italy officially joined an alliance with Nazi Germany. But the fact that he supported fascist ideals definitely doesn’t bode well for his character.^[3]

7 Alexander Graham Bell

One of the most prolific inventors of the Victorian Era, Alexander Graham Bell, was a pioneer for members of the deaf community. Though we mostly know him for inventing the telephone, he actually got the idea for the “electrical speech machine” by trying to communicate with his hearing-impaired mother. The audiometer followed, which is still used to test people’s hearing to this very day. He was so influential in hearing technology that the “bel” in “decibel,” which measures the loudness of sounds, was named after him.

Sadly, Bell didn’t have the most progressive ideas about the people he was helping. The inventor didn’t believe deaf people should procreate with each other, as he was worried they’d create a “defective variety of the race.” Modern deaf advocates are very proud of their condition and have found Bell’s dip into eugenics not only unfortunate but discriminatory.^[4]

6 Louis Pasteur

All press is good press. Unless the title of that press happens to call you a “liar who stole rival’s ideas.”

A 1995 New York Times article titled “The Doctor’s World” outed the historical scientist and inventor of pasteurization as a thief and liar. How did they find this out almost 100 years after Pasteur’s death? It’s all thanks to the scientist’s 102 laboratory notebooks that he left behind with orders to not be opened by strangers. Unfortunately for Pasteur, professor Gerald Geison of Princeton University was able to gain access to the books, which spelled out Pasteur’s crimes.

The most major of these is in relation to Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old boy who was bitten by a rabid dog. Pasteur claimed he had a rabies vaccine that had been successfully tested dozens of times and administered to the boy. Amazingly, even though the vaccine had actually never been tested before, Meister survived.^[5]

5 Steve Jobs

If you ask Siri about Steve Jobs, she’ll probably be required to say that the inventor of the iPhone was a stand-up guy and brilliant techie. If you ask his family, you’ll probably get a different answer.

In 2018, Jobs’s daughter Lisa published a memoir titled Small Fry. From the first few sentences, Lisa makes clear that her father was never very interested in his family relationships. For the first three years of her life, Jobs’s vehemently denied being her father until a few days before he founded Apple. Then, he gave in and started paying the bare minimum in child support.

It didn’t get much better after that. Lisa’s book details the horrors she went through, from being verbally abused by Jobs, who told her from the age of 9 that she would grow up to be nothing, to being described as his “mistake.” Throughout her life, Lisa never received any monetary help from Jobs besides the required child support. Jobs’ neighbors ended up helping her pay college tuition.

Many hail Jobs for this “tough love” approach, claiming it taught Lisa to rely on her own skills and not her father’s. While this might be true, there are definitely no excuses for the odd treatment of his eldest child, which included forcing her to be in the room when he groped women and talked about sex.^[6]

4 Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla’s rivalry with fellow inventor Thomas Edison is well documented. Many see Edison as the antagonist of the situation due to his tendency to “borrow” other’s ideas without crediting them (including those of his former employee, Tesla). On the other side, Tesla is often praised for being an endearing oddball.

Unfortunately, some of Tesla’s strange ideas weren’t as cute as his love of pigeons. Throughout the 1930s, the Serbian inventor openly supported the idea of forced sterilization for criminals and mentally ill people—otherwise known as eugenics. He went so far as to say that by the year 2100, eugenics would be “universally established,” as it was the best way to “weed out the less desirable.”

Eugenics in Europe would grow rapidly due to its utilization by the Nazi Party, which shared Tesla’s beliefs, and even expanded them to any non-Aryan people.^[7]

3 Albert Einstein

No one can deny Albert Einstein was a certified genius. His name has practically become synonymous with wisdom.

But intellectually intelligent doesn’t necessarily mean emotionally intelligent. Or nice. Einstein met his future wife, Meliva Marie, in a class at ETH Zurich, where she was the only female student. Despite her educational merit, Einstein treated her, as he put it, “as an employee I cannot fire.” Poor Meliva had to adhere to a strict set of rules, which Einstein wrote out in multiple letters throughout the late 19th century.

These rules included cleaning and cooking for him, not talking to him unless he wanted to be spoken to, allowing him to sleep with other women, and “renouncing all personal relationships with me insofar as they are not completely necessary.”

Even after attempting to follow these ridiculous rules, Einstein divorced her for his own cousin, with whom he’d been cheating on her. Then, he cheated on his cousin during their marriage.

Talk about an atomic failure.^[8]

2 Thomas Edison

A 2013 episode of the American sitcom Bob’s Burgers featured nine-year-old Lousie Belcher attempting to dig up dirt on Thomas Edison in order to humiliate her Edison-adoring teacher. When Louise discovered that Edison Studio electrocuted an elephant on film for entertainment in 1903, she made a musical out of the whole ordeal. Her brother plays the evil Edison.

What she comes up with is a hilarious and catchy musical called “Topsy,” named after the dead elephant. The episode was wildly popular and educated many about Topsy and Edison. But the episode takes some liberties. While Edison Studios was responsible for electrocuting the former circus elephant, Edison himself had no say in the event and did not even attend.

That being said, Edison was no saint. He was known for taking others’ ideas and improving upon them. But many would call that stealing. Though he’s known for inventing the lightbulb, incandescent bulbs had been around for some years, worked on by dozens of inventors. Historian Ernest Freeberg explains Edison needed to “claim to be the sole inventor in order to win the crucial patents,” which would determine who controlled the new device’s market shares.

Edison “certainly was, by no stretch, an inventive genius,” having created over 100 patents in his lifetime (including the phonograph). Almost none of the ideas were originally his, though he claimed credit and profited from all of them.^[9]

1 Henry Ford

Henry Ford changed American culture forever when he figured out how to make cars accessible for even middle-class citizens. Thanks to Ford’s Model T and the new manufacturing assembly line, cars could be made so cheap that prices were low enough for any American to purchase. Many at the time considered Ford a genius, not only in engineering due to the invention of the Model T but also in business. Ford introduced a 40-hour work week, continued to innovate cars, and grew what essentially became an American empire.

But like many business owners, Ford had some troubling ideas. The most famous of these is his staunch anti-semitism. Ford published many troubling articles referring to anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in his newspaper “The Dearborn Independent.” He put these 91 articles together to form a book called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.

Ford’s fame and fortune made him very influential, and his ideas began to spread. In fact, the reason square dancing is taught in American schools today is because Ford funded the lessons in order to combat the rise of jazz music, which he associated with Jews.

And Americans weren’t the only ones listening. In 1924, leading member of the Nazi Party, Heinrich Himmler, described Ford as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, Hitler himself kept a life-sized portrait of Ford in his office and, in 1931, called the engineer his inspiration.

Usually, any compliment is good to hear, but sheesh.^[10]