Do you know what’s interesting about that list? Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history every since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.
Here’s the list of those Americans and their birth years:
1. John D. Rockefeller, 1839
2. Andrew Carnegie, 1835
28. Frederick Weyerhaeuser, 1834
33. Jay Gould, 1836
34. Marshall Field, 1834
35. George F. Baker, 1840
36. Hetty Green, 1834
44. James G. Fair, 1831
54. Henry H. Rogers, 1840
57. J. P. Morgan, 1837
58. Oliver H. Payne, 1839
62. George Pullman, 1831
64. Peter Arrell Brown Widener, 1834
65. Philip Danforth Armour, 1832
What’s going on here? The answer becomes obvious if you think about it. In the 1860s and 1870s, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railroads were being built and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy had functioned were broken and remade. What this list says is that it really matters how old you were when that transformation happened.
If you were born in the late 1840s you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820s you were too old: your mind-set was shaped by the pre–Civil War paradigm. But there was a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the fourteen men and women on the list above had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity, in the same way that hockey and soccer players born in January, February, and March are given an extraordinary opportunity.
*
Now let’s do the same kind of analysis for people like Bill Joy and Bill Gates.
If you talk to veterans of Silicon Valley, they’ll tell you that the most important date in the history of the personal computer revolution was January 1975. That was when the magazine
Popular Electronics
ran a cover story on an extraordinary machine called the Altair 8800. The Altair cost $397. It was a do-it-yourself contraption that you could assemble at home. The headline on the story read: “PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH! World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.”
To the readers of
Popular Electronics,
in those days the bible of the fledgling software and computer world, that headline was a revelation. Computers up to that point had been the massive, expensive mainframes of the sort sitting in the white expanse of the Michigan Computer Center. For years, every hacker and electronics whiz had dreamt of the day when a computer would come along that was small and inexpensive enough for an ordinary person to use and own. That day had finally arrived.
If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age, then who would be in the best position to take advantage of it? The same principles apply here that applied to the era of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
“If you’re too old in nineteen seventy-five, then you’d already have a job at IBM out of college, and once people started at IBM, they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world,” says Nathan Myhrvold, who was a top executive at Microsoft for many years. “You had this multibillion-dollar company making mainframes, and if you were part of that, you’d think, Why screw around with these little pathetic computers? That was the computer industry to those people, and it had nothing to do with this new revolution. They were blinded by that being the only vision of computing. They made a nice living. It’s just that there was no opportunity to become a zillionaire and make an impact on the world.”
If you were more than a few years out of college in 1975, then you belonged to the old paradigm. You had just bought a house. You’re married. A baby is on the way. You’re in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit. So let’s rule out all those born before, say, 1952.
At the same time, though, you don’t want to be too young. You really want to get in on the ground floor, right in 1975, and you can’t do that if you’re still in high school. So let’s also rule out anyone born after, say, 1958. The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it. Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955.
There is an easy way to test this theory. When was Bill Gates born?
Bill Gates: October 28, 1955
That’s the perfect birth date! Gates is the hockey player born on January 1. Gates’s best friend at Lakeside was Paul Allen. He also hung out in the computer room with Gates and shared those long evenings at ISI and C-Cubed. Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates. When was Paul Allen born?
Paul Allen: January 21, 1953
The third-richest man at Microsoft is the one who has been running the company on a day-to-day basis since 2000, one of the most respected executives in the software world, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer’s birth date?
Steve Ballmer: March 24, 1956
Let’s not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates: Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Computer. Unlike Gates, Jobs wasn’t from a rich family and he didn’t go to Michigan, like Joy. But it doesn’t take much investigation of his upbringing to realize that he had his Hamburg too. He grew up in Mountain View, California, just south of San Francisco, which is the absolute epicenter of Silicon Valley. His neighborhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard, then as now one of the most important electronics firms in the world. As a teenager he prowled the flea markets of Mountain View, where electronics hobbyists and tinkerers sold spare parts. Jobs came of age breathing the air of the very business he would later dominate.
This paragraph from
Accidental Millionaire,
one of the many Jobs biographies, gives us a sense of how extraordinary his childhood experiences were. Jobs
attended evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists. The talks were about the latest advances in electronics and Jobs, exercising a style that was a trademark of his personality, collared Hewlett-Packard engineers and drew additional information from them. Once he even called Bill Hewlett, one of the company’s founders, to request parts. Jobs not only received the parts he asked for, he managed to wrangle a summer job. Jobs worked on an assembly line to build computers and was so fascinated that he tried to design his own...
Wait.
Bill Hewlett gave him spare parts?
That’s on a par with Bill Gates getting unlimited access to a time-share terminal at age thirteen. It’s as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani. And when was Jobs born?
Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955
Another of the pioneers of the software revolution was Eric Schmidt. He ran Novell, one of Silicon Valley’s most important software firms, and in 2001, he became the chief executive officer of Google. Birth date?
Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955
I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. Some weren’t, just as not every business titan in the United States was born in the mid-1830s. But there are very clearly patterns here, and what’s striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.
By the way, let’s not forget Bill Joy. Had he been just a little bit older and had he had to face the drudgery of programming with computer cards, he says, he would have studied science. Bill Joy the computer legend would have been Bill Joy the biologist. And had he come along a few years later, the little window that gave him the chance to write the supporting code for the Internet would have closed. Again, Bill Joy the computer legend might well have been Bill Joy the biologist. When was Bill Joy born?
Bill Joy: November 8, 1954
Joy would go on, after his stint at Berkeley, to become one of the four founders of Sun Microsystems, one of the oldest and most important of Silicon Valley’s software companies. And if you still think that accidents of time and place and birth don’t matter all that much, here are the birthdays of the three other founders of Sun Microsystems:
Scott McNealy: November 13, 1954
Vinod Khosla: January 28, 1955
Andy Bechtolsheim: September 30, 1955
The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1
“KNOWLEDGE OF A BOY’S IQ IS OF LITTLE HELP IF YOU ARE FACED WITH A FORMFUL OF CLEVER BOYS.”
1.
In the fifth episode of the 2008 season, the American television quiz show
1 vs. 100
had as its special guest a man named Christopher Langan.
The television show
1 vs. 100
is one of many that sprang up in the wake of the phenomenal success of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
. It features a permanent gallery of one hundred ordinary people who serve as what is called the “mob.” Each week they match wits with a special invited guest. At stake is a million dollars. The guest has to be smart enough to answer more questions correctly than his or her one hundred adversaries—and by that standard, few have ever seemed as superbly qualified as Christopher Langan.
“Tonight the mob takes on their fiercest competition yet,” the voice-over began. “Meet Chris Langan, who many call the smartest man in America.” The camera did a slow pan of a stocky, muscular man in his fifties. “The average person has an IQ of one hundred,” the voice-over continued. “Einstein one fifty. Chris has an IQ of one ninety-five. He’s currently wrapping his big brain around a theory of the universe. But will his king-size cranium be enough to take down the mob for one million dollars? Find out right now on
One versus One Hundred
.”
Out strode Langan onto the stage amid wild applause.
“You don’t think you need to have a high intellect to do well on
One versus One Hundred
, do you?” the show’s host, Bob Saget, asked him. Saget looked at Langan oddly, as if he were some kind of laboratory specimen.
“Actually, I think it could be a hindrance,” Langan replied. He had a deep, certain voice. “To have a high IQ, you tend to specialize, think deep thoughts. You avoid trivia. But now that I see these people”—he glanced at the mob, the amusement in his eyes betraying just how ridiculous he found the proceedings—“I think I’ll do okay.”
Over the past decade, Chris Langan has achieved a strange kind of fame. He has become the public face of genius in American life, a celebrity outlier. He gets invited on news shows and profiled in magazines, and he has been the subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris, all because of a brain that appears to defy description.
The television news show
20/20
once hired a neuropsychologist to give Langan an IQ test, and Langan’s score was literally off the charts—too high to be accurately measured. Another time, Langan took an IQ test specially designed for people too smart for ordinary IQ tests. He got all the questions right except one.
*
He was speaking at six months of age. When he was three, he would listen to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the comics aloud, and he would follow along on his own until he had taught himself to read. At five, he began questioning his grandfather about the existence of God—and remembers being disappointed in the answers he got.
In school, Langan could walk into a test in a foreign-language class, not having studied at all, and if there were two or three minutes before the instructor arrived, he could skim through the textbook and ace the test. In his early teenage years, while working as a farmhand, he started to read widely in the area of theoretical physics. At sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s famously abstruse masterpiece
Principia Mathematica
. He got a perfect score on his SAT, even though he fell asleep at one point during the test.
“He did math for an hour,” his brother Mark says of Langan’s summer routine in high school. “Then he did French for an hour. Then he studied Russian. Then he would read philosophy. He did that religiously, every day.”
Another of his brothers, Jeff, says, “You know, when Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he would draw things just as a joke, and it would be like a photograph. When he was fifteen, he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on a guitar. Boom. Boom. Boom. Half the time, Christopher didn’t attend school at all. He would just show up for tests and there was nothing they could do about it. To us, it was hilarious. He could brief a semester’s worth of textbooks in two days, and take care of whatever he had to take care of, and then get back to whatever he was doing in the first place.”
*
On the set of
1 vs. 100
, Langan was poised and confident. His voice was deep. His eyes were small and fiercely bright. He did not circle about topics, searching for the right phrase, or double back to restate a previous sentence. For that matter, he did not say um, or ah, or use any form of conversational mitigation: his sentences came marching out, one after another, polished and crisp, like soldiers on a parade ground. Every question Saget threw at him, he tossed aside, as if it were a triviality. When his winnings reached $250,000, he appeared to make a mental calculation that the risks of losing everything were at that point greater than the potential benefits of staying in. Abruptly, he stopped. “I’ll take the cash,” he said. He shook Saget’s hand firmly and was finished—exiting on top as, we like to think, geniuses invariably do.