The Sad Story Of The Smartest Man In History

The brightest and hottest stars burn out the fastest. It's true in the cosmos and seems to be true with people. When you think of genius, you think of people who have changed the world such as Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Sir Issac Newton just to name a few.
But there are some people whos genius is unmeasurable. People whose IQ is literally off the chart. Logic would hold that these are the people who most likely to move society forward but that's not always the case. Sometimes the brightest stars burn out before they get a chance to make their mark. The man who had an IQ higher than Albert Einstein and Issac Newton. This is the story of the smartest man in history, but you have never heard of him.

Albert Einstein had an IQ of 160. Where Issac Newton's IQ was 190. But the man I'm talking about had an IQ of 260. His name is William James Sidis. Possibly the smartest human being that ever lived. For context, the average person's IQ is between 85 and 115.

 

At the age of just 6, William could speak 8 languages! He was born in 1898 in new york. His parents were geniuses themselves. William's father was a psychologist who graduated from Harvard. With intelligence running in his blood and with an IQ higher than the likes of Einstein and Newton, he was destined to be successful. But we have never heard of him.
so what really happened?

At the age of just 18 months, William could read the new york times and could write letters in English and French. By the age of 8, he was a polyglot, he learned Latin, greek, french, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian on his own. He didn't only learn the languages, by the age of 8, he even invented a language of his own called "Vendergood".
At the age of 9, he wanted admission into Harvard where they thought that he was too young made him wait until he was 11 to enroll.
He was also the youngest person ever to be admitted to Harvard. It was the year 1909. William was accepted into Harvard at the age of just 11. At Harvard, he proved that actually be smarter than most of the professors and gave lectures on fourth-dimensional bodies which drew hundreds of people. He became something of a cultural phenomenon at this point.
He was titled as the "Child Prodigy".

He was done with his bachelor of arts degree by the age of 16. William became famous because of his excellent capabilities but fame wasn't his cup of tea. William wanted to live a secluded life. He liked to live alone. According to him, it was a perfect life. He also added that he never wanted to get married. William wanted to run away from all the fame and attention.
William's father knew that his son was special. He pushed him a lot to carry on with his education. But as William grew up he refused to live life on his father's terms. He wanted to live a normal life. This led to a feud between the father and son. As a result, when William's father Borris passed away in 1923, William didn't even attend his funeral. 

With all the attention and fame, William wanted to keep a low profile. That's why he worked as a clerk and other small jobs. But still, he used to get recognized by people because he wrote literally dozen of books on subjects ranging from Cosmology, American history, Anthropology, Transportation Systems, and weirdly on Streetcar Tickets which he collected. He published books under a variety of different pseudonyms including one called "The animate and the inanimate" in 1925 in which he postulated that there were regions of space where times goes in reverse and would not emit light. Soon the headlines turned against him. When William started working a $100 a month job, the newspapers mocked his intelligence saying that he lost the capabilities that he had in childhood. Soon, William became a socialist.

During World War 1, he was an objector and protested in Boston against the war. As a result, he was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison. But his parents bailed him out. William spent the rest of his life in loneliness. He worked as a machine worker to earn his bread.
The man who had the ability to change the world passed away at the age of just 46 in 1944 due to a cerebral hemorrhage.
William was lost in history forever. This was the life he chose to live.

The kind of pressure put on William James Sidis is exactly the sort of thing to break someone. Being raised to believe he's the single most extraordinary person on the planet might sound like a great life, but it's been significantly proven that "golden children" grow up to have high rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and to be generally unstable because no one ever taught them how to just be a person.