Chapter 15 Summary

Chapter 15 talked a lot about “mad scientists” and their supposed ways but this chapter really dug deep into actual scientists who shared “mad” characteristics. The chapter first starts off with the story of William Crookes. Kean explains how he was a rather well acknowledged scientist in his early thirties. However, when his brother died at sea he went “mad”. He made contraptions and theories of spirituality and the existence of his dead brother when he went to séances en mass to mourn for him. Although many scientists thought of his work as ridiculous ghost ideas, he managed to pull out of his pathological science stage and began woking with selenium and radioactivity. Kean then goes on talking about scientists finding shark teeth on the bottom of the ocean covered in manganese, and then tells the theory of the megalodon. 
He moves on to the scientists Pons and Fleischmann. These two scientists came to fame and credit over their scientific findings with electric currents, water and palladium. When they discovered that palladium soaks up an extreme amounts of hydrogen when in water with electricity, they automatically released their results of a new age of energy before they could test the experiment more thoroughly. Thy went down in history as frauds of their own results but also as the scientists who started the important research on such a reaction. He next talks about Röntgen. Without the crazy details, he basically skirted pathological science madness and was still able to manage creating the x-ray.