I think you’re selling yourself short with some of those names. Some of them were pretty stupid, for all their genius, like Einstein who stated flat out that the idea of the continents floating around on tectonic plates was absolutely ridiculous. And Tesla (like Edison) patented almost every thought he had, some were bound to be right!
Leibniz and Schroedinger (ok, Einstein too), Maxwell, sure. Many of the rest could just have been first because they were cleverer than contemporaries, rather than cleverer than you. I’ve just finished reading the Letters of the Younger Pliny, and think it’s amazing that they never invented printing. Pliny himself was quite the engineer, and they published so many books, sold throughout the empire so scriptoria must have employed tens of thousands of people, but nobody clicked from using blotting paper that you could reverse the process to print books......
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