Scientists and their interesting lives

I remember that there was once talk about having a TV show on the Discovery Channel which was basically a soap opera with famous scientists as the characters. The stories would be entirely NON-fiction. Being a student of science history, thereby being familiar with all sorts of wild and interesting stories about the wild and crazy world of scientists, I was very excited about the chance to see this spectacle.

Can you imagine it?

• Socrates' trial
• Leibniz vs Newton
• Infighting at the manhattan project
• Alan Turing's "shameful" secret (overlooked by the british government until he outlived his use)

Drama is so easy to find whenever you get people together. What makes science drama interesting is that it reminds you how simple and petty people can be regardless of their intellectual prowess.

If you think that maybe the secret lives of scientists isn't as interesting as I claim, take some time to learn about the interesting relationship between T.Edison (history's greatest monster) and N.Tesla.

Cracked magazine's website makes it funnier than it really was:

[Edison] did not invent the light bulb. Edison was not the smartest scientist around—not by a long shot. He did, however, hire a brilliant man named Nikola Tesla, who luckily was.

Tesla is responsible for radio, microwaves, primitive radar systems and the electricity we use today, which Edison gets credit for. The truth is that Edison hired Tesla to redesign his electrical generators. Tesla did, but when he asked for the $50,000 he was promised, Edison replied, and this is a direct quote, “Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and paid him only in middle fingers.

Tesla quit and tried to strengthen his electrical discoveries in an effort to provide free energy for the entire world, but Edison and his thugs at General Electric devoted time not spent on stealing patents to making sure that the rest of the scientific community thought Tesla was crazy and dangerous. Tesla died alone and in serious amounts of debt. Edison died on a pile of money in a “Suck it, Tesla" T-shirt that he did not design.

Who wouldn't want to see that televised?