As he himself had admitted, he was not a scientist. His grasp of physical theory was minimal, his command of advanced mathematics nonexistent. He was an entrepreneur of a kind that would become familiar to the world only a century or so later, with the advent of the so-called “start-up” company. In his time the closest models for this kind of behavior were unsavory—for example, the men who made fortunes selling quack medicines, immortalized in H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay.
