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9781668634028

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Edison's Ghosts is a lighthearted and amusing account of some of history's most influential people. Even the brightest minds can produce some truly dim moments and this book doesn't hold back.-- Nick Caruso, New York Times bestselling author of Does it Fart? Edison's Ghosts is a masterful combination of historical research and comedic storytelling, infused with erudition and judiciously dropped F-bombs. I laughed out loud on nearly every page. It is truly inspiring to read about the stupidity of geniuses. Thank you, Katie, for knocking these wunderkinds down a few pegs and making the rest of us feel smarter in the process.-- -Justin Gregg, author of If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal [Edison's Ghosts] takes a lighthearted tour of the missteps of scientific heavyweights, including Thomas Edison's so-called phone to heaven and the time Isaac Newton temporarily blinded himself after studying the sun without eye protection.--Publishers Weekly Katie Spalding is one of those annoyingly talented writers. Funny, and with an absurd amount of obscure knowledge, Edison's Ghosts is a must-read on how everyone is much, much stupider than they make out.-- James Felton, author of Assholes: The Dead People You Should Be Mad at With wit and charm, each of Katie Spalding's stories in Edison's Ghosts nudges, pushes, and eventually shoves some of our most illustrious celebrity thinkers right off their pedestals. Whether it was learning how Pythagorus died from an ill-timed fascination with beans, the career derailing procrastination of Leonardo Da Vinci, the truly impressive-in-its magnitude gullibility of Arthur Conan Doyle, or the failed attempt of the titular Edison to create a phone for calling ghosts, this warts-and-all review of the human, the very silly human, side history's most famous geniuses will fuel your dinner party conversations for years. --David McRaney, author of You Are Not So Smart

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"Katie Spalding spent ten years of her life studying maths, which is just about the upper limit on how much maths you can do before people start actively avoiding you at parties. She was awarded her PhD in 2018 for a thesis titled ""Growth and Geometry in Multi-Valued Dynamics"", which is a particularly mathematical way of saying she drew a lot of pictures and pointed at them while saying ""look, see?"" and hoping nobody asked any follow-up questions. After leaving the world of academia, Katie worked at IFLScience where she mixed scientific explanation and news with humor to an audience of hundreds of thousands. She has supplied research for the TV show QI and its sister podcast No Such Thing As A Fish; her articles have also been seen in HuffPost, PoliticsMeansPolitics and the Maths in Schools journal, among others. Susie Riddell is an experienced narrator and actress who trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, she went on to narrate BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. She has had major roles in the radio productions of Frankenstein, The Great Gatsby, and 1984."

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