The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  2 As historians have noted, Kemmler probably doomed himself by being too calm and collected in the face of death. If he’d only panicked a bit—like the guards and witnesses on hand—the sweat on his skin probably would have conducted the electricity into his body more efficiently and helped kill him right away.

  3 Among other tricks, octopuses can juggle objects and open jars—without having been taught how. Or consider Otto, an octopus at an aquarium in Germany. Apparently Otto resented the lights that were shining into his tank at night. So he learned to haul himself up to the tank’s edge and squirt water at the lights, shorting them out. He repeated this process three nights in a row, baffling the aquarium staff who couldn’t understand why the circuits kept burning out. They finally took to sleeping on the floor at night before they caught him.

  4 Although the internet likes to paint Edison as the villain in Tesla’s life, George Westinghouse was the one who really screwed him over. Westinghouse signed Tesla to a generous royalty contract in the late 1880s; it paid Tesla $2.50 for every one horsepower generated by his equipment. Given Westinghouse’s fantastic rate of expansion, that would have amounted to $12 million by 1893 ($323 million today), a sum that would have bankrupted the firm. So Westinghouse begged Tesla to tear up their contract. “Your decision determines the fate of the Westinghouse company,” he said. Incredibly, Tesla did as he was asked. Unlike Edison, Westinghouse had believed in him, and Tesla felt duty-bound to help. So they voided the contract.

  Sadly, Westinghouse was not so generous to Tesla in return. Many years later, when the Westinghouse Company was obscenely profitable, Tesla returned to his benefactor, hat in hand, and asked for some of the money back. Westinghouse refused, and Tesla ended his life more or less indigent, unable to afford even the rent at the hotel in New York where he lived. For more on the sad end of Tesla’s life, see episode 18 of the Disappearing Spoon podcast at samkean.com/podcast—a tale that, believe it or not, involves Donald Trump.

  6

  SABOTAGE: THE BONE WARS

  Edward Drinker Cope was ecstatic. He’d just scooped his nemesis, Othniel Charles Marsh, and had done so in the most humiliating way possible.

  It was August 1872, and teams led by Cope and Marsh were both digging for fossils in southwest Wyoming. Each group was heavily armed and trying to avoid contact with the other, but there was always a dusty wagon track here, or some abandoned tools there, to remind them of the enemy. One day Cope’s curiosity got the better of him, and he spent a few hours spying on Marsh’s team from afar, concealing himself as they hacked at rocks in the distance.

  When they packed up and left, Cope snuck down to investigate. To his delight, he found an overlooked skull fragment; several teeth were scattered nearby as well. In fact, the unusual combination of skull and teeth suggested a brand-new species of dinosaur. That it had slipped through Marsh’s fingers no doubt added a bounce to Cope’s step as he pocketed the bones and strolled back to camp.

  He had no idea the joke was on him. Aware of his spying, Marsh’s diggers had “salted” the site with the skull and teeth, which belonged to different species. They were hoping to trick Cope into a public blunder, and he walked right into the trap. He published a paper about his “discovery” soon afterward, only to have to retract it later.

  Rivalries are funny things. They waste time and energy. They stir up mean instincts and consume us with petty emotions. Yet in doing so, rivalries also push people to greatness. In their fury to one-up each other, Marsh and Cope discovered hundreds of new dinosaurs and other species and filled whole museums with specimens. Their work also transformed dinosaurs from an obscure taxon of lizard into some of the most famous animals of all time. Like a lovely phoenix, an entirely new understanding of Earth’s history, and the place of human beings within it, arose from the ashes of their hatred.

  Oddly enough, Cope and Marsh began as friends, despite strikingly different temperaments.

  Marsh plodded. He drifted through his youth on a farm east of Niagara Falls, hunting and fishing, and might have gone right on drifting through his whole life if not for his uncle George Peabody. For whatever reason, the wealthy financier took a shine to the lad and paid for his enrollment at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. (Marsh entered at age twenty; classmates called him “Daddy.”) School awakened in Marsh an unexpected passion for natural history, and Uncle George dutifully sent his nephew to Yale afterward. There, Marsh collected so many minerals and fossils in the attic of his boardinghouse that his surprisingly indulgent landlady, who lived beneath, had to reinforce her ceiling to keep the beams from buckling.

  Marsh—who had a pinched face and beady eyes—longed to start a family, but he was always awkward around women. (He once called a potential love interest the “prettiest little vertebrate” he’d ever laid eyes on.) Resigned to a bachelor’s life, he traveled to Europe after graduating Yale in 1860, and spent several years studying at different museums and universities on Uncle George’s dime.

  Cope, in contrast, raced through life—the hare to Marsh’s tortoise. Cope grew up outside Philadelphia, and was considered a child prodigy in natural history. While working on a farm one summer at age thirteen, he seized a two-foot-long snake by the neck and blithely hauled the hissing, whipping serpent back to his host family. They panicked, screaming that it was poisonous. But in between its attempts to bite him, Cope calmly examined the snake’s teeth and explained why they were wrong—it lacked the right fangs to inject venom. So, he said, no need to worry.

  Hotheaded paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in his office. (More pictures are available at samkean.com)

  By age twenty-one, Cope—who had a devilish grin and flamboyant mustache—had published thirty-one scientific papers, an impressive start to his career. At the same time, he was also developing a reputation as hotheaded. Although born a Quaker and raised a pacifist, Cope was a brawler by nature; a friend once described his approach to life as “war at whatever it cost.” He clashed most often with his father, a merchant who’d bought his son a tract of land and was grooming the boy to go into farming; they quarreled constantly over his future. Cope liked sparring with other scientists, too. He once exchanged blows with a colleague in the hallway outside a scientific meeting, leaving them both with black eyes. The man was Cope’s best friend.

  In 1861, Cope moved to Washington, D.C., to study at the Smithsonian Institution. Alas, he was something of a lothario and got tangled up in a messy love affair there. Because most of his letters from this period have gone missing (or were destroyed), the details remain mysterious. Was his paramour a charwomen, an heiress, a Capulet to his Montague? No one knows. Regardless, Cope’s father sent him overseas to disentangle him from Madame X, a trip that also spared him the possibility of being drafted into the Union army.

  As two young American naturalists abroad, Cope and Marsh naturally ran across each other in Europe, meeting in Berlin in 1863. True to form, Marsh, thirty-two, had been patiently studying there for months, while Cope, twenty-three, was blowing through town on a frantic tour, popping in and out of different museums. Marsh later painted Cope as borderline mad in Berlin—an unstable Hamlet still pining over his lost love. Marsh nevertheless took a liking to his younger colleague, and they began swapping letters every few months. After returning to the United States, Cope even named a new type of amphibian after Marsh, and Marsh returned the honor and named an aquatic reptile after Cope.

  Still, it didn’t take long for their relationship to fray. The first spat involved some dinosaur pits in New Jersey. Dinosaurs were first recognized as something unique in England in 1817, and amateur fossil-hunters like Mary Anning were responsible for several early discoveries there. But no one knew dinosaurs existed in North America until 1858, when naturalist Joseph Leidy recovered the bones of a duck-billed dinosaur (Hadrosaurus) from a quarry in New Jersey. (Typically, the quarry workers noticed the bones initially, during routine digs; the quarry owners then alerted scientists, who
took over after that.) With Leidy’s blessing, Cope began working in the quarries in 1866 and excavated a carnivorous dinosaur (now called Dryptosaurus). The discovery so excited Cope that, to his father’s frustration, he quit his teaching job the next year and moved his new wife and daughter closer to the pits to dig full-time. To capitalize on their discoveries, Leidy and Cope hired a sculptor to mount a twenty-six-foot replica of the Hadrosaurus at a museum in Philadelphia—the first mounted dinosaur skeleton in history. It was a brilliant fusion of art and science,1 and word about it soon reached Marsh in New Haven.

  Like Cope, Marsh had done well for himself lately. He’d been pressing his Uncle George to establish a natural history museum at Yale, and in a bit of genteel extortion, he’d let Yale know that he expected to be rewarded for brokering the deal. Peabody finally coughed up $150,000 ($2.6 million today) and in exchange, Yale appointed Marsh trustee of the museum and named him a professor of paleontology, the first such post in North America.

  Professionally, then, Marsh had reached the pinnacle of U.S. fossil-hunting. Scientifically, though, Cope and his New Jersey specimens were hogging all the glory. So, Marsh wrote to Cope to ask if he could visit the quarries. Cope agreed, and in March 1868 the two spent a happy week tramping about in the rain and snow, digging and exploring. At the end of which, Marsh thanked Cope for his generosity, left for the train station—and quickly doubled back to the pits. There, he bribed the quarry owners to cut Cope out and start routing the best fossils to him instead. After that, all the choice bits ended up at Yale.

  Cope didn’t learn of this duplicity until later, but by that point he and Marsh had already had a falling-out over another incident. A few years prior, railroad workers hacking through some shale out in Kansas had uncovered a spectacular plesiosaur, an extinct aquatic reptile. The skeleton ended up with Cope, who named the beast Elasmosaurus. The name means “thin-plate reptile” or, more colorfully, “ribbon reptile,” after its extraordinary long tail, which stretched dozens of feet. Cope then mounted the skeleton for display at a museum in Philadelphia and dashed off a paper about its anatomy.

  Marsh once again visited Cope to view the skeleton, and was once again boiling with jealousy. Upon taking a closer look, however, his frown flipped upside down: He’d spotted a blunder. In his haste, Cope had inverted the vertebrae. That is, he’d mistaken the top of the spine for the bottom of the spine, and had consequently mounted the skull on the beast’s posterior. The ribbon-reptile didn’t have an immensely long tail at all; it had an immensely long neck.

  Marsh later swore he’d been gentle in pointing out the mistake. Cope maintained he’d been “caustic” and cruel. Regardless, the two men fell to quarreling over the spine’s orientation. To arbitrate the matter, they called in Leidy, who also worked at the museum. After looking things over, Leidy plucked off the skull, took a long walk down to the tip of the “tail,” and reattached it there.

  Cope was mortified. However prolific, he was still a young scientist, and a high-profile mistake like this could derail his career. He began buying up and destroying every last issue of the journal with the Elasmosaurus paper in it, even asking colleagues to mail him their copies, at his expense. (He later printed a new issue with the mistake corrected.) Marsh dutifully did as Cope asked and sent his journal in—then bought two more copies on the sly, which he kept for the rest of his life. He regarded the whole incident as hilarious. Cope, meanwhile, was furious, and never forgave Marsh for exposing him.

  Even if Marsh had never embarrassed Cope, the two men’s temperaments would have driven them apart eventually. Cope was speedy, Marsh slow. Cope was charming, Marsh guarded. And while Marsh believed wholeheartedly in Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution, becoming an early champion in the United States, Cope sympathized with creationists and struggled to accept evolution as a fact. Even when he did, he reserved a role for God in the process, a notion Marsh sneered at.

  Still, despite their mutual distaste, their relationship probably wouldn’t have deteriorated into outright hatred if not for a change of scenery. While ensconced in comfortable museums out East, their antipathy remained civil. Once they shifted to the Wild West, Cope’s war at whatever cost became inevitable.

  Millions upon millions of years ago the interior of North America was a gigantic inland sea, an American Mediterranean. Untold numbers of creatures died and were buried in its depths and on its shores, and erosion and tectonic uplift eventually exposed their remains. The result was one of the richest fossil beds in history. Through the mid-1800s, fossils were so abundant in some places out West—just lying on the ground, like primordial picnic remains—that a shepherd in Wyoming once built an entire home out of ancient bones, an osteological log cabin.

  Word of this bonanza began to trickle back East after the Civil War, and in 1870 Marsh organized a fossil-hunting expedition out there, paid for in part by a bequest from his Uncle George. His primary field hands were a dozen whippersnappers from Yale, but the U.S. Army provided critical support. In the 1870s, it was actually easier to travel from the East Coast to Europe than to many places west of the Mississippi, and Marsh’s crew depended heavily on the army and its frontier forts for supplies. Moreover, given the U.S. government’s efforts to push Indian tribes off their lands (if not exterminate them), Marsh’s crew likely would have been ambushed and killed without military muscle. In fact, at Marsh’s first stop, a fort in Nebraska, he met an antelope hunter who’d staggered in the day before with an arrow sticking out of him.

  Overall, seventy people made up Marsh’s initial party, including army escorts and a few Pawnee guides. Everyone carried a bowie knife, carbine, and six-shooter. The most notable among the entourage was William Cody, later known as Buffalo Bill, the Wild West showman. (Not yet famous then, Bill worked for the army as a scout.) As the party headed off, Bill listened to Marsh lecture about the giant thunder-lizards of yore, and how all the dust-choked land around them had once been underwater. Bill just nodded, smiling inwardly and pretending to play along. He’d told some tall tales in his day, but he had to hand it to Marsh: he’d never told a whopper as big as that!

  Brooding paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh with Chief Red Cloud, who called Marsh “the best white man I ever saw.” (Courtesy of Yale University.)

  Buffalo Bill peeled off the second day, declining to help dig up fossils. But the soldiers accompanying Marsh eagerly pitched in. (The Pawnee were more reluctant, until Marsh showed them some ancient horse fossils, which delighted them and changed their minds.) When searching the bluffs for bones, the diggers looked not only for shape but texture—bone was smoother and shinier than rock, and often had a telltale spongy interior. Once located, the fossils were hacked out with chisels, knives, spades, or picks, whatever it took. The diggers also spent agonizing hours crawling around on their knees, noses in the dirt, searching for bone fragments or teeth that had worked themselves loose naturally. Delicate structures were wrapped in cotton or frontier newspapers and tucked into cigar boxes or tin cans for the trip back East. Hulking femurs—some of which weighed a quarter-ton—might be encased in strips of burlap dipped in plaster of Paris, the same basic method doctors used to make casts for fractures.

  To get from site to site, the troops marched for up to fourteen hours at a stretch, in temperatures approaching 120°F. Food was decently plentiful—buffalo steaks, stewed jackrabbit, canned vegetables and fruits—but water so scarce that they sometimes had to fill their hats during thunderstorms and slurp it down. Bears and coyotes hounded them, and rats and salamanders swarmed their tents at night. But for Marsh, the hardships couldn’t undermine the thrill of collecting. In addition to dinosaurs, his crew unearthed mastodons, ancient camels and rhinoceroses, and several different species of extinct horse. In fact, when they reached Utah, Brigham Young himself interrogated Marsh about the horse remains. This encounter baffled the naturalist, until Young revealed the reason for his interest. According to Mormon theology, horses originated in the Americas, not
Eurasia, and he was looking for evidence to this effect. No naturalist back then would have supported the notion, but Marsh’s work would eventually prove Young right. (The Yale field hands, meanwhile, were more interested in interrogating Young’s twenty-two daughters, whom they flirted with in a box at the local theater.)

  By trip’s end, in December, Marsh had sent whole train cars full of fossils back to Yale. But his most celebrated find came during his very last hour in the field, in Kansas. While poking around some rocks off a trail, he noticed half a bone lying on the ground. It was six inches long and hollow, like a thick drinking straw. He pegged it as part of a hand bone, equivalent to a section of the pinkie. But what species, he didn’t know.

  Alas, the light that day was fading, and Marsh had no time to hunt for the bone’s other half. All he could do was carve a cross in the rock face nearby, to mark the spot, and return next season.

  Marsh spent the winter brooding over the fragment. Based on its distinct shape, he concluded that it belonged to a pterodactyl. The only problem was, all known species of pterodactyls then had tiny wingspans, hawk-sized or smaller. If this bone really did correspond to its pinkie, the beast must have been a goliath, with wings at least twenty feet across—a “dragon,” Marsh remembered thinking.

  It was exactly the kind of discovery that would win him glory—provided he was correct about the dragon’s size. But what if the bone’s other “half” was actually much smaller, or what if this wasn’t part of its pinkie at all? Uncharacteristically, Marsh threw off caution and rushed something into print. He then spent the next few months fretting. Would this be his skull-on-the-tail moment, the cudgel by which Cope would exact revenge?