Wildfire snaps up Spalding’s ‘hilarious’ dive into the stupidity of the world’s greatest minds

Wildfire has signed The Limits of Genius: The Surprising Stupidity of the World’s Greatest Minds by journalist Katie Spalding. 

Publishing director Alex Clarke acquired world rights from Doug Young at PEW Literary for publication on 25th May 2023. It is also being published in the US by Pronoy Sarkar at Little, Brown, under the title Edison’s Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History’s Greatest Geniuses.

The publisher says: “Whether it’s Nikola Tesla falling in love with a pigeon or non-swimmer Albert Einstein’s near-fatal love of sailing holidays, history is littered with examples of the so-called brightest minds doing, to put it bluntly, some really dumb shit. 

“Katie Spalding’s joyful deep dive into the historical archives takes us from Pythagoras, whose fear of beans led him to his incredibly stupid death, to Marie Curie, whose somewhat lax approach to lab safety protocol led her to accidentally poison herself and thousands of strangers, via James Glaisher, a Victorian hot-air balloon pioneer who nearly became the world’s first human satellite. 

“Sparky, entertaining, endlessly startling, The Limits of Genius heralds the début of an exciting new voice in popular science/history writing.”

Spalding spent 10 years of her life studying maths, receiving her PhD diploma in 2018 and appearing on “University Challenge” twice. She now writes for the science news website IFLScience and has supplied research for “QI” and “No Such Thing as a Fish”. 

She commented: “It’s been amazing to work with the teams at Wildfire and Little, Brown, who have been so supportive of me ruthlessly character assassinating some of the most famous people in history. For too long, in my opinion, we have looked upon people like Newton or Einstein as ‘geniuses’ instead of what they really were: fascinating, human – and dumbasses, the lot of them.”

Clarke said: “Katie Spalding’s The Limits of Genius is a total joy to read – she revels in the profound weirdness and straight-up idiocy of some of history’s supposedly greatest minds – from Pythagoras to Einstein and so many in between. Her writing is sharp, hilarious and hugely entertaining.”