Word: crackpot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Among Freud's many strange pupils, Dr. Wilhelm Reich was surely the strangest. To his disciples, he was a prophet who preached a gospel of orgasm. But many colleagues in Europe put him down as a pornographic charlatan and Communist crackpot. After Reich moved to the U.S., a federal court handed him a two-year sentence for defying a court order that forbade shipment of his notorious but harmless "orgone box" across state lines.* Yet now, 14 years after his death in the Lewisburg (Pa.) prison, Reich is recognized as a pioneer of the nonverbal, body-oriented therapies that...
...Crackpot and Eccentric. By the 1840s, Porter's urge to paint was waning, and journalism caught his grasshopperish interest. In 1845, while working as an electroplater in New York, he launched the Scientific American, mainly to have a showcase for his ideas. He served as editor, wrote most of the early articles, and liberally sprinkled the magazine with the Rube Goldberg-esque diagrams that he made for his machines. But within a year of its founding, he sold it. He had an idea for a rifle with a revolving chamber and foolishly sold it to Samuel Colt of Hartford...
EVEN in an age that venerates heresy, the iconoclastic philosophy of Louis Orth Kelso outrages many a professional economist. "A crackpot theory," argues Money Expert Milton Friedman. "Instead of saying that labor is exploited, Kelso says that capital is exploited. It's Marx stood on its head." Replies Kelso: "Damn right-and what's wrong with that...