5 geniuses and their not very cool habits: Nicolas Tesla did hundreds of exercises for the toes of his feet, and Pythagoras had horror of beans. Not all scientists were cool all the time.

Rice with Pythagoras

Is it possible for someone to have PAVOR for a vegetable?

IT IS. Believe it or not: Pythagoras, the mathematician and philosopher of Ancient Greece, had horror of beans. Proof of this is the comic illustration above, made in 1512 and now displayed in a museum in France. His disciples were among the first vegetarians in history and willingly accepted symbolic food restrictions - such as the unfortunate case of the legume. To this day no one knows what the justification for banning the poor bean was.

Sleep well, Einstein.

The legend that the physicist Albert Einstein slept for very few hours a year runs free on the internet. But beyond biologically unlikely - even geniuses need rest - this story has already been disproved in practice by the biographer Walter Isaacson. According to him, the father of relativity did just the opposite: he slept at least eight hours a day, and considered a good sleep imperative to become a balcony machine the next morning. He would spend up to ten hours in bed, much more than the average person.

The habit is not eccentric: it is healthy, and it has scientific bases. In surveys like this, volunteers spent a period trying to solve a mathematical puzzle. It could even be solved on the basis of the insistence, but who had a moment of eureka! And he noticed the logic was better. After the first attempt at resolution, half of the participants went to sleep, and another half stayed awake. Upon returning to a new round of the game, those who took a nap had the magic insight twice as often. Sleepers from all over the world, join Einstein!

Tesla's Magic Toe

Almost all the achievements of the Serbian Nikola Tesla have a pinch of madness - certainly there is nothing normal about doing full head calculus at age 14, after all. Later, when he was already living in the United States, the mechanical engineer concluded that intelligence and electricity went hand in hand and proposed, with the approval of the authorities, to electrify the walls of classrooms to better the school performance of American children - The idea, fortunately, never left the paper.

The above list is just a free sample of Tesla's out-of-the-way head (and half no-no), but nothing bizarrely overcomes his favorite nighttime exercise: twitching his toes more than a hundred times in a row, a habit that, he said, Your brain connections. The recommendation, without scientific evidence, was narrated by the biographer Marc Seifer in the book Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. Like every good tip without head or tail, it was well received in the virtual culture, and became a guaranteed presence on lists of life hacks for executives.

Healing through nudity

The journalist, editor, author, philanthropist, politician, abolitionist, civil servant, scientist, diplomat, inventor and (!) Chess player Benjamin Franklin - central figure of the American Revolution - had a peculiar method of treatment for diseases such as smallpox - or simply for Keep your health up: the dry ice bath. He can explain in his own words, available at franklinpapers.org. "I'll take the opportunity to mention a practice I've gotten used to. You know that the cold bath has long been in vogue as a popular tonic here, but the shock of the cold water always seemed to me, generally speaking, too violent. I realized that it is much nicer for my constitution to bathe in another element, the cold air. With that in view, I get up most of the morning and sit in my room, without any clothes, for half an hour or an hour, according to the season, reading or writing. This practice is not at all painful, on the contrary, it is pleasant, and if I go back to bed later, before I dress, I supplement my nocturnal rest with one or two hours of the most pleasant sleep imaginable. It hurts my health, if it does not contribute much to its preservation. From now on I will call it a tonic bath. "

In other words, if you want to change the history of humanity, take a peek in the cold of Washington.

Twitter old-school by Buckminster Fuller

You may not know the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller by name, but you've seen his most famous creation: the Geodesic Dome, which decorates Disney's Epicot Center and has a number of important theoretical and practical applications in architecture and engineering. Without further ado, let's go to your list of habits.

Fact # 1: his fascination with the multifaceted spheres was so great that he went to live in one, custom built with the help of his wife.

Fact # 2: He was traveling by plane with three wristwatches, each adjusted to a different country. The idea was to avoid confusing time zones.

Fact # 3: Between 1920 and 1983, when he died, he would update his diary every 15 minutes every day, without fail. The result? An eight-foot tall stack of notes that contains every detail of your life and is well-guarded at Stanford University. The name of the project is properly incomprehensible: Dymaxion Chronofile.

Source of report: Super Interessante Magazine