The output of historic geniuses is just insane. The sheer amount of work and discovery and creation they did seems too much for one lifetime. I just don’t understand how they managed all they did.
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Well, they had women to do a lot of the piddly stuff for them. They weren’t cleaning up after themselves or cooking for themselves or worrying about their laundry and shit like that, so there’s a few extra hours a day.
Folks like Michelangelo and Beethoven worked – Michelangelo did his masterpieces ***because*** he got paid for it. He was patronized by a rich man to paint or sculpt, and that rich man paid for all Michelangelo’s expenses while Michelangelo was working for him. That’s how he had time to do the Sistine Chapel – the pope paid him to work exclusively on the Sistine Chapel. Same as the pope paid any other worker who did work in the Vatican. Michelangelo got paid more than the labourer who just fixes plastered walls, but they were both paid for their work.
And Beethoven’s job was writing and performing music. That’s how he had time; he made time so he could make money. Just like songwriters today. He could afford it because it was the profession he chose so he could afford things…same way I can afford to play with Photoshop; it’s my job, I have to find time.
Others, like Newton, were landed gentry and didn’t have to work because they owned a bunch of land and bunch of people living there paid rents. So rents funded his lifestyle, and *his* lifestyle consisted of watching apples fall and writing about it instead of gambling like his peers. He had plenty of time to philosophize.
Out side of being rich themselves, another way was that they had rich patrons who gave them money to do their work.
Everything everyone is saying here is absolutely true but it seems like everyone is missing one key aspect
A lot of these guys didn’t just have more time *they were brilliant* at what they did.
They were highly intelligent people who were just exceptional at what they did because they were naturally talented.
They may have had more time but they were also able to get stuff done faster and made brilliant discoveries and great works of art simply because their minds just worked differently.
Does it explain entirely why these men were great? Not at all, but it can’t be overlooked.
Passion and a lack of distractions explain a lot of it. Plus they weren’t from the working class so they didn’t have to waste their lives toiling in fields or mines or factories.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain, than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweat shops.”- Steven Jay Gould
Newton did his best work when he retreated during a plague. Like literally, he moved away from all the people and did nothing but work for two years.
While I do not in any way discount the genius of these people, because they reached groundbreaking conclusions with a lot less fundamental knowledge that we take for granted today, but it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of them belonged to higher social classes. They had wealth, status, sizeable income, often passive. That left them a lot more time to actually work on their studies than the average commoner had.
Well for those listed, science, music, art… Was their fulltime jobs… Einstein, many of the great thinkers… they worked for universities.
Labor was cheap.
It’s only the 20th century where people in the middle to upper class were no longer expected to have one or more permanent members of staff in their households. If you could maintain the same income as you do currently, but offload the laundry, the cooking, the weekly shopping, the childcare, and the home maintenance off to someone else… How much free time would you have?
People have touched on the “how did they find the time” thing.
The other thing to remember is that a lot of what they did discover wasn’t necessarily crazy complicated. It’s just not many people at the time were looking. Today a lot of easy meat is picked off the bone and what’s considered easy enough for an undergraduate research project is typical considered banal.
Ideas about calculus in certain specific domains (especially polynomials) predate Newton and Leibniz. Kant’s work is based on what he perceived to be the mistakes of his predecessors, and Michaelangelo and Beethoven didn’t need to find the time – that was their literal day and night job their whole lives from childhood.
Something to add to the people saying they were either rich or it was their job: these people were actually geniuses. If they had to work 14 hours a day they would still have spent time musing and pondering and possibly creating. Would they have come up with the vast majority of their works or been able to even approach the skill they obtained? Absolutely not. Those were only possible through intense dedication and practice, but the indication that anyone with enough time can do what they did is misleading. Newton with 30 minutes a day will still do more than I will with that same amount of time.
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