The Genius Myth summary

Vasari’s book was incredibly popular for centuries, and helped pave the way for the rise of the Romantic movement, which pushed back on the increasing rationality of the 17th and 18th centuries. Poets like Byron became towering cultural icons in this period – and cultivated a cult of genius despite being, in the words of one of his lovers Caroline Lamb, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

In fact, for many in the Romantic period, genius excused a host of bad behaviors. Byron’s many affairs with both men and women, and possibly even his own half sister, would be considered scandalous today. The Romantics cultivated the idea of a genius as a sort of ethereal, other-wordly being, often frail, pale, and delicate. While this was largely due to the widespread impact of tuberculosis on the population, the idea of a genius acting outside of the rules of civilized behavior paved the way for what came next.

There is no clearer indicator of the lasting impact of this notion of genius as inheritable than the founding of the Repository for Germinal Choice in 1980. Known popularly as the Genius Sperm Bank, it literally sold the idea that one could have superior children by acquiring some genius DNA. It should surprise no one that one of the more famous recruits to the endeavor, William Shockley, was a successful engineer who had already destroyed his career, and all of his personal relationships, by becoming an amateur geneticist and eugenicist later in life. 

Coincidentally, Shockley had been considered in childhood for a long-term, large-group psychological study conducted by Lewis Terman, published as Genetic Studies of Genius in 1925, with follow-up publications over four decades. Terman was convinced that the recently devised Binet-Simon IQ test could be used to identify intellectually superior children to separate them from the so-called “feeble-minded.” He traveled widely through the United States administering the test to middle school students to identify participants.

While both boys and girls qualified for Termin’s study, most of the female participants did not achieve equal success to their male counterparts. While war was the major disruptor for men in the study, for women success was far more linked to their marital status than major world events. To understand why, consider the women in the lives of Albert Einstein and Leo Tolstoy.

During his student days, Albert Einstein married a fellow student at the Zurich Polytechnic, Mileva Marić. He was a mediocre student; she had fought hard to study physics. He enjoyed having an intellectual equal with whom he could discuss math and physics, as well as a domestic servant all rolled into one. 

Technology and innovation have been intertwined with genius in the modern imagination since the days of Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park in the 1870s. In fact, Edison did more to shift the notion of genius away from Romantic artists and toward inventors and technologists than any other figure in history. He hired a team of engineers and tinkerers and retreated to a small town in New Jersey for the cheap rent. In that humble workshop, modern genius was born.

In 1877, Edison produced his most significant invention there, the phonograph, although its significance failed to make an impression on Edison and his team for months. In the end, it was introduced to the public after rumors of a French company developing a similar device reached America. Surprisingly, the public was completely dazzled by the phonograph – who quickly saw its potential for music, recording the speech of loved ones, and making the past audible.