The scientist

My grandfather had once been very rich due to his great inventions. He had the mind for big ideas. The scientific projects during the first half of his life made him a billionaire, but the featherbrained projects in the second half of his life left him in abject poverty. He had squandered his wealth, through charity and unwise scientific projects. He had spent millions of dollars in a project he carried out to duplicate a leaf and thereby end world poverty. It came to nothing. 

Then came his impractical idea of solving the energy crisis by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using a catalyst. In the laboratory it worked but when he implemented it in large scale it ran into endless problems, it wasn’t cost effective and had to be abandoned. Undaunted well maybe mildly daunted he started the endeavor to use the motion of the waves to generate electricity in a large scale, thereby providing the whole country and then the whole world with electricity, and the solving great environmental problems like global warming and pollution. In the end it became a sad joke. 

Some people believe that somewhere in his late forties he suffered brain damage due to the toxic effects of some of the chemicals he used during his experiments, namely mercury. There are times I believe that this might be true, for how could you otherwise explain one of his later projects. He firmly believed that the Sigiriya Rock Fortress was really a fallen meteorite and it had elements and compounds that have never been found on earth. He concluded that by using these chemicals he could create a chain reaction that would among other things - create rain at will, reverse global warming, make gold, reverse ozone layer depletion, create a totally indestructible metal. By the time this project was over everyone called him a fool, and he had lost all his money and fallen into debt. 

Written by: RJX