20 Scientific Rivalries That Turned Into Vicious Personal Wars

In 1885, Nikola Tesla, an engineer from Serbia, quit Thomas Edison’s company after Edison wouldn’t fund his alternating current (AC) ideas or treat him equitably. Because Edison had developed his company on direct current (DC), he sabotaged Tesla by publicly electrocuting stray animals from 1888 to 1893 and secretly funding the development of the first AC-powered electric chair to show how dangerous AC was. Tesla countered by performing live shows where he ran AC current through himself. Ultimately, AC prevailed and became the foundation for our modern power grid.

In 1870, paleontologist Edward Cope assembled a long-necked marine reptile named Elasmosaurus, only to mistakenly attach the skull to the wrong end (the tail). Othniel Marsh, a Yale-based paleontologist and friend of Cope’s, worked with anatomist Joseph Leidy to point out the mistake. The insult was so great that it permanently ended their friendship. Thereafter came decades of bitterness, including bribes to field clerks, the hiring of spies, and a newspaper exposé in 1890. In spite of all this, they were able to describe more than 130 new species.

Rosalind Franklin, a chemist studying the structure of DNA, was employed at King’s College in London. For years, she clashed with fellow researcher Maurice Wilkins, who saw her more as his assistant than an equal. In January of 1953, Franklin was about to leave for another college. Her student, Raymond Gosling, gave Wilkins her best X-ray image of DNA, Photo 51. Wilkins showed it to two Cambridge researchers named James Watson and Francis Crick, without telling Franklin. It wasn’t stolen from Franklin. Instead, institutional friction allowed her work to slip away.

In the 1660s, Isaac Newton worked out the foundations of calculus in private, while the German genius Gottfried Leibniz came up with it himself and published it in 1684. It has long been accepted by historians that they did so independently. Nonetheless, as Leibniz’s notation spread across Europe, Newton charged that Leibniz had plagiarized him. In 1712, Newton used his position as president of the Royal Society to organize a secret committee to arbitrate the dispute, and he then wrote the report himself. This quarrel effectively cut Britain off from the mathematical developments of Europe for decades.

In 1859, Charles Darwin’s landmark book On the Origin of Species was published. Darwin was once friends with Sir Richard Owen, Britain’s top comparative anatomist, who had inventoried many of Darwin’s fossil specimens. Owen claimed that only people had an area in their brains known as the hippocampus minor. Thus, he argued, man stood apart from the apes. When Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s most ardent supporters, dissected ape brains, he proved Owen wrong. But in April 1860, Owen released a vicious, 45-page diatribe against Darwin, published anonymously in a literary review.

Michael Faraday started as Sir Humphry Davy’s lab assistant in 1813, after the British chemist recruited the bookbinder’s apprentice who had taught himself everything he knew. By 1821, when Faraday demonstrated continuous electromagnetic rotation, which is the basis for the electric motor, he was a celebrity overnight. Davy’s jealousy led him to accuse Faraday of plagiarizing another scientist, but that scientist immediately exonerated Faraday. Yet when Davy was president of the Royal Society in 1824, he voted against Faraday’s election as a Fellow. Despite Davy’s solitary “no,” Faraday was still elected.

In 1618, three comets appeared above Europe. A Jesuit mathematician named Orazio Grassi correctly deduced that they were real bodies situated beyond the Moon. But Galileo was jealous of Grassi’s rising celebrity and contended that comets were mere optical illusions of the atmosphere. He was wrong. After Grassi replied under a pseudonym, Galileo published a vicious satirical pamphlet, The Assayer, in 1623, which publicly mocked him. Galileo’s wit won the argument, but he lost the backing of the Jesuits for his heresy trial in 1633.

Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of speech, filed his full patent for the telephone at the US Patent Office on February 14, 1876. Electrical engineer Elisha Gray had submitted a competing notice to the patent office just hours later that same day, and Bell was granted the patent a few weeks later. Supporters of Gray have claimed that members of Bell’s group bribed an examiner to leak information about Gray’s filing, but no evidence has ever been produced to support the accusation. For decades, the courts upheld Bell’s priority, which Gray never accepted as fair.

Sigmund Freud appointed the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as his intellectual successor when they first met in 1907. But Jung rejected Freud’s theory that every neurosis could be traced back to childhood trauma, usually involving repressed sexual experience. Instead, he believed there was a collective unconscious that all people shared. Freud dismissed Jung’s idea as mysticism. Jung felt that Freud had treated him like an overbearing father. In 1913, the two men stopped communicating after a series of letters in which they each concluded that the other suffered from a different psychological complex. The correspondence ended their relationship and divided psychoanalysis into opposing camps.

In April 1908, a physician named Frederick Cook claimed he had made it to the North Pole. In April 1909, an engineer named Robert Peary said he’d also made it to the North Pole. When their claims reached the press in September 1909, Peary’s deep-pocketed supporters and public relations team went to great lengths to discredit Cook. They exposed fraudulent photographs Cook had taken during an earlier unsuccessful attempt to summit Mount McKinley. It now seems that neither Cook nor Peary actually reached the North Pole, since miscalculations or the effects of ice drift were likely involved. Cook’s reputation was never restored.

In 1935, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, then 24 years old, was working on a theory of how stars die. Chandrasekhar gave a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society in London, explaining that if a star were large enough, its core would collapse forever, eventually becoming what we now know as a black hole. Sir Arthur Eddington, the leading astrophysicist in Britain, immediately rose to denounce the paper. He insisted that no such thing as an infinite collapse was possible and blackballed the research from the major journals. Chandrasekhar abandoned the idea for decades, then won the Nobel Prize in 1983.

Niccolò Tartaglia, the Venetian mathematician, found a method of solving cubic equations in 1535. The Italian physician Gerolamo Cardano swore an oath not to reveal it in 1539, but upon learning that someone else had already solved the problem, he ignored his vow and published the answer in 1545. Tartaglia was livid and distributed angry pamphlets. The affair culminated in a mathematical duel held in Milan in 1548 between Tartaglia and Cardano’s student, Ludovico Ferrari.

Urbain Le Verrier, a French mathematician, calculated where an invisible planet must be lying that was throwing off Uranus’ orbit, and his coordinates enabled astronomers in Berlin to spot Neptune on September 23, 1846. Later, George Airy, the British Astronomer Royal, advocated that John Couch Adams, a Cambridge mathematician, should share discovery credit for having made the same calculations earlier. Le Verrier was incensed and accused the British of trying to steal credit from the French. Later reviews of the records in the 1990s vindicated Le Verrier, showing that the numbers Adams came up with were considerably more inaccurate than previously thought.

The Italian physician Marcello Malpighi, teaching at the University of Bologna, turned his microscope to discovering capillaries in 1661, which gave physicians a better understanding of how blood circulates through the body. Malpighi’s colleague, Giovanni Sbaraglia, considered the study of microscopic anatomy pointless and preferred traditional medicine. Their rivalry had already gotten personal in 1659, when Malpighi’s brother killed Sbaraglia’s older brother during a land dispute. From then on, Sbaraglia’s only contribution was to write anonymous pamphlets against Malpighi and do all he could to prevent his rise to prominence within the university.

Joseph Priestley, an English natural philosopher, produced a colorless gas by heating a mercury compound in August 1774. He called it dephlogisticated air, since he was still thinking in terms of an obsolete theory of combustion. In October that year, Priestley described how to make the gas to French chemist Antoine Lavoisier at a dinner party in Paris. Lavoisier repeated the experiment and, with better accuracy, recognized that the new substance was actually the chemical agent responsible for combustion, and christened it oxygen. This discovery began what historians refer to as the Chemical Revolution. Priestley, meanwhile, got little credit for finding it first.

An Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, devoted himself to explaining how heat is simply the motion of invisible atoms. The philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach, however, was adamant that no such particles existed. He held that scientists should focus only on observable phenomena. At one meeting in 1895, Mach is said to have quipped to Boltzmann, “Have you ever seen one?” Boltzmann was stung by the ridicule and suffered from chronic depression and illness. He died in 1906, right before work by Einstein and others proved that atoms are real.

In 1791, Luigi Galvani noticed that touching a frog’s legs with two different metals during dissection caused muscle twitching. He believed he had demonstrated that animals possessed some type of “animal electricity.” This conclusion was disputed by another physicist, Alessandro Volta, who argued that the frog tissue acted as a wet, conductive surface between the two metals, and not as the energy source itself. In 1800, Volta constructed what would become the first battery, the Voltaic Pile. By alternating plates of zinc and copper, separated by brine-soaked pieces of cardboard, Volta demonstrated that electricity could be produced chemically.

Following the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s, French chemist Louis Pasteur and German physician Robert Koch emerged as fierce competitors in the burgeoning science of bacteriology. While Koch preferred growing pure cultures on solid media and often took jabs at the more flexible techniques used by Pasteur, Pasteur had Koch’s lectures at an 1882 meeting in Geneva translated into French so that he might disparage them at length in front of his peers. Once Koch identified the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis in 1882, Pasteur’s laboratory quickly began work on competing vaccines.

In 1672, Robert Hooke, a curator of experiments at the Royal Society in London, challenged some of Isaac Newton’s conclusions in a paper on light, and Newton promptly retreated from scientific debate. In 1679, Hooke wrote to Newton proposing that gravity varied according to the inverse square of distance. By 1687, when Newton presented the full mathematical demonstration in his “Principia,” he had barely mentioned Hooke. After Hooke’s death in 1703, Newton was elected president of the Royal Society. Years later, when the Society moved its headquarters, it lost its only portrait of Hooke.

When World War II was over, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed up the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, believed it was wrong to build a hydrogen bomb for various moral and strategic reasons. A former colleague of Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, disagreed and wanted to go ahead. At Oppenheimer’s hearing on his security clearance in April 1954, Teller testified that he would feel safer if public affairs were “in other hands.” The result was that Oppenheimer lost his clearance forever. For years after that, other physicists refused to talk to Teller.

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