5 World-Renowned Experts Who Were Just Straight-Up Crackpots

5

Harry Matthews Tried To Sell A Fake Death Ray To The British Army

The term "mad scientist" gets thrown around a lot these days, but there's no better way to describe Harry Grindell Matthews. Matthews wore an eye patch and a long black coat, and lived in an isolated compound in the Welsh hills, guarded by electric fences and barbed wire. What was he doing up there? What else would a mad scientist do up there? He was building a death ray.

Spoiler alert: Death rays weren't invented in the 1920s. We know this because we're not currently working in the laser-mines of Immortal Emperor Matthews. But people were quick to trust ol' One-Eye McDeathray, mostly because he'd built an impressive crazy genius resume. He had invented a radio-controlled boat, a way to detect underwater submarines, and the "aerophone" -- an honest-to-god cellphone in 1909! He had also been the first man in the UK to transmit his voice via radio wave. So when Matthews claimed he had invented a powerful, invisible ray weapon in 1924 -- so powerful that its activation put his assistant into a coma for 24 hours -- people figured that it, much like Matthews himself, was just crazy enough to work.

Underwood and UnderwoodIt looks just like the back of the comics promised it would!

Matthews had a well-honed demonstration too, including bits where he stopped a motorcycle engine and even killed a mouse at short range with his ray. With the right funding, the scientist claimed, he could make his death ray powerful enough to destroy airplane engines mid-flight, or even "annihilate" entire armies and cities. And because headlines with the words "death ray" in them sell about a bajillion copies, publications like The New York Times, Time, Le Matin, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science Monthly all heralded the loony Englishman as the greatest genius to have ever lived. This, in turn, drew the attention of the British military, including Sir Winston Churchill himself, who wanted to see what this war-winning weapon could do.

At this point, the death ray blew up in Matthew's face. Figuratively speaking, of course, because the laser was too weak to cause any real damage. When the army asked for a demonstration, three of its scientists were so unimpressed that they stepped in front of the beam to show how pointless it was. Furious, Matthews left England and announced his intent to sell his death ray to a foreign -- maybe even enemy -- country. But no one wanted a laser that was barely powerful enough to scan a barcode.

4

A Surgeon Claims He Can Transplant Entire Human Heads

The world's first face transplant was a miracle of modern medicine. But that was all the way back in 2005. What's the hot new thing? Why, transplanting entire heads!

3

Andrea Rossi Claims To Have Invented Impossible Green Energy -- Twice

Garret Morgan invented both the traffic light and the gas mask. Tesla invented both alternating current and the induction motor. Leonardo da Vinci invented both the helicopter and the perfect five-alarm chili recipe. Great inventors have at least two marvels under their belt. To that list you can now add Andrea Rossi, but only if you don't mind that none of his world-changing inventions actually work.

In the 1980s, Rossi gained fame in Italy for a groundbreaking invention: a machine able to process garbage and industrial waste, then turn it into oil. In reality, the only oil he was selling was of the snake variety. Instead of healing the world, Rossi had been hiding all the toxic waste in leaky storage tanks, and when officials finally found him out, it cost the Italian government about $50 million to clean up 77,000 tons of toxic mess. But despite being under investigation for environmental crimes, Rossi didn't do any time for it, mostly because he was already in jail on unrelated gold-smuggling charges.

2

Congress Nearly Fell For A Fake Perpetual Motion Machine

In the early 1980s, some goofball named Joseph Newman claimed to have invented a machine that could produce infinite, clean, free energy. In his kitchen. His application for a patent was quickly rejected, but what Newman lacked in scientific credentials, he made up for with pizzazz. After a few publicity blitzes, his nonsense had become so widely accepted that the U.S. government decided they wanted in on the action after all.

Republican senators Thad Cochran and Trent Lott drafted bills to force the Patent Office to issue a "pioneering patent" for the "unlimited source of energy." Newman would have been set for life if it hadn't been for one other pesky senator: former astronaut and engineer John Glenn. Glenn easily demolished Newman's claims, leaving him "speechless," and the inventor slunk back into obscurity.

NASA"The only seemingly impossible feats of science I recognize are the ones on my resume."

1

A Famous Archaeologist Fooled Japan With Made-Up Discoveries For Decades

Shinichi Fujimura was a self-taught archaeologist who made some groundbreaking discoveries (technically all archaeological discoveries are groundbreaking, but you get the idea). He captivated the Japanese public, who gave him the nickname "The Hands of God" for his amazing -- some would say wildly implausible -- gift for unearthing miraculous finds on every single dig he went to.

But as unqualified as Fujimura was, and as unbelievable his finds were, Japan's overly polite scientific community wasn't able to properly fight back. A big part of that was that Fujimura's discoveries were crazy popular with the masses, and it's not hard to see why. He claimed that he had found man-made stone artifacts dating back 700,000 years, meaning the Japanese had entered the Stone Age roughly half a million years before the rest of the world. That's a pretty amazing head start, and a damning case that The Flintstones was blatantly whitewashing Asian prehistory.

Bjoertvedt/Wikimedia CommonsNot bad for people who would've been about four evolutionary steps back at the time.