By Elizabeth Terry
Summary: In this poignant article, author Elizabeth Terry recounts stories of the many inventors and investigators throughout history who were initially branded frauds before the merit of their contribution was understood and accepted. She cites the Wright brothers, whose first “flying machine” was disbelieved by the popular press in spite of eyewitness accounts filed by their very own reporters, as well as one Joshua Coppersmith, who was arrested in 1865 for demonstrating a device he claimed would “convey the human voice over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener on the other end.” Of course, today the telephone and airplane are so common that we tend to forget there was a time when they would have been impossible to imagine. More importantly, we forget that innovators in any field tend to be discredited before they are ballyhooed, and sometimes, as in the case of Dr. Royal Lee and the other pioneers of nutrition, it is many years before the wisdom they offered passes from quackery to common sense. From the National Health Federation Bulletin, 1957.
View PDF: Quacks
Subscribe to RSS Feed
