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From the very beginning, the emergence of an ideal man who would embody all the best features of the species was the pursuit of many thinkers, philosophical schools, ideologies and ordinary people who wanted to maximize their potential. Boris Sidis, who conducted an experiment on his own child, also tried to create the man of the greatest intelligence. William James Sidis was supposed to have an IQ of 300, but his life ended tragically.
- Boris Sidis wanted to prove to himself and to the world that a genius can be created. However, appropriate techniques are necessary for this, which should be implemented from the earliest moments of a child’s life
- When his firstborn son was born, it was on him that Sidis and his wife decided to conduct his great experiment
- Raised in accordance with his method, the child achieved spectacular success, incl. wrote a typewriter at four, spoke eight languages fluently, and was admitted to Harvard at 11
- William James Sidis suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 12, and later went through a period of rebellion typical of teenagers and withdrew from academic life
- After his parents put him in a “sanatorium” and constantly threatened with a referral to a psychiatric institution, their relationship cooled, which eventually resulted in the breaking of contacts
- William James Sidis, considered the most intelligent man in history, died in oblivion
- More information can be found on the Onet homepage
Boris Sidis focused on knowledge as the key to life success. It can be safely said that the pursuit of development was the driving force behind his actions, which, although it led to the success of his “project”, ended in failure.
Borys Sidis came from a poor Jewish family in Berdyczów, Ukraine. After obtaining basic education, which could be provided by the Jewish community and his relatives, he began to acquire knowledge on his own. Seeing it as the basis of freedom, he began to educate peasants, passing on to them the acquired knowledge and teaching them to read, write and count. His the actions did not meet with the favor of the tsarist authorities, so he was captured and finally imprisoned for two years.
On the wave of the economic crisis and the pogroms of Jews, nearly 1881 of whom were recorded in Our Country in 1884-300, Boris Sidis decided to leave the country and went to America. In the United States, driven by the desire to develop and expand knowledge, he entered the prestigious Harvard University and graduated from it with degrees, incl. With psychology i psychiatry. He soon became an authority in these fields, and in New York City he co-founded the Psychiatric Institute and a scientific journal that readily published reprinted texts on psychopathology.
William James Sidis. Brilliant fruit of a scientific experiment
In United States Boris Sidis also met a woman with whom he decided to tie himself up for life. She was a Ukrainian immigrant, Sara Mandelbaum, who also took the opportunity given to her by America and graduated from the prestigious medical studies at the Boston University School of Medicine. After their marriage, their firstborn son, William James Sidis, was born (April 1, 1898) In accordance with the will of his father, he was named after the name and surname of the precursor of phenomenology and humanistic psychology.
William James Sidis at birth did not stand out from other newborns, but his father decided to prove to himself and to the world that this state could be changed and thanks to proper upbringing and training, make his son maximize his potential and become a genius. The system developed by Boris Sidis brought spectacular results. After the child was shown letters from an early age and taught how to pronounce them, the boy became fluent in English and French, in which at the age of four … he wrote his first book. On the machine.
«We decided from the very beginning to treat Billie (William) as an adult. Children want to be treated as adults (…) Boris told me that a child’s mind can be molded long before it learns speech. That if parents treat their children reasonably, provide truthful information and justify it logically, it will sharpen the possibilities of even the youngest child. After all, the mind builds up like muscles, and these don’t come from lying in bed. We were supposed to encourage our child to think, to follow any path he wanted, to develop his interests. We were to answer all his questions with precision and as long as he thought he had had an answer»- wrote about her son Sara Sidis in the book” How to Raise a Genius “.
Which may not be surprising reports of little genius appeared in the press more and more often and adorned the covers of newspapers, from which readers could learn new, fascinating facts about the life of William James Sidis. The boy was to be fluent in eight languages, and in repeated IQ tests he was to achieve results that reached 300 points. The eight-year-old child also created his own artificial language called vendergood and developed its grammar and spelling. Vendergood was based on Latin and Greek, and drew on German, French, and other Romance languages.
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William James Sidis. 11-year-old from Harvard University
Boris Sidis was extremely proud of the results of his experiment, which could be admired not only by the hermetic academic world, but thanks to media reports and popularity – the whole of America. He managed to monetize the gained authority in the field of upbringing, or rather “training” children, and turned it into a publishing success. In the years 1904-1910, apart from 10 books, he also published many articles. Believing in the success of his educational “project”, Boris Sidis said that his 9-year-old son had already mastered the material of primary and secondary school enough and… he should go to university.
William James Sidis followed in the footsteps of his famous father and headed for Harvard University. The child passed the university exams without any problems, but the university authorities decided not to accept him. The boy was found to be extremely mentally developed, but still a child in terms of emotional development. The press came to the aid of the disappointed attitude of the Harvard authorities. It asked why the boy, baptized by the media as the smartest child in the world, could not study at Harvard, if he had met such an important criterion as passing the exams. Under pressure from the press, one of the professors persuaded his colleagues to give the genius child a chance, and so young William James Sidis at the age of 11 was admitted to one of the best universities in the world.
Boris Sidis’ son was the youngest person admitted to Harvard. He mastered higher mathematics very quickly and began to lecture at the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional geometric figures. Unfortunately, as previously predicted by Harvard University authorities, academic studies and living in a student environment were a heavy burden for the genius teenager. At the age of only 12, he experienced a mental breakdown, which was carefully noted in his records.
- The psychologist scared the child many times. He was conducting an unethical experiment
Despite the mental breakdown that may have resulted from too much pressure from the public and the media, constant observation by psychology specialists and physical attacks by older “colleagues”, William James Sidis nevertheless continued his “adventure” at Harvard and at the age of 16, on June 18, 1914, he graduated with honors from undergraduate studies. Shortly after graduating from the undergraduate studies and getting into the graduate studies He revealed to journalists eager for new reports that he would like to live in isolation. He also stated that he planned to be celibate and would never marry.
At 17, with the support of his parents, he joined Rice University in Houston, where he worked as an assistant math teacher and taught Euclidean, non-Euclidean and first-year maths. William James Sidis told his friend about his work:
I never knew why they gave me this job – I’m not a very good teacher
To the surprise of his family and surroundings, William James Sidis dropped out of his Masters in Mathematics and declared that he would become a lawyer and began studies in this field at Harvard in 1916. Ultimately, however, he decided to break with academic life and without giving any reason he resigned from his last year studies in 1919. Shortly after these events, Declaring himself a socialist, he took part in the May Day parade in Boston, which turned into riots. William James Sidis fell into the hands of the police and was arrested as well sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Thanks to the intercession of his father, who still had memories of a prison in Ukraine, he managed to avoid being hit behind bars. After he challenged the idea of God’s existence, expressed a negative opinion about World War I, and praised socialism as a system that is optimal for human development, his parents … put him in a “sanatorium” in New Hampshire for a year, then they moved to California where he spent another year and was “reformed”. At the time, William James Sidis he was constantly threatened by his parents that he would be forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital.
William James Sidis and his forgotten legacy
After regaining his freedom and independence in 1921, young William James Sidis, unsurprisingly, did not want to maintain contact with his parents and cut himself off completely. He lived alone in New York and did low-paid jobs. The conflict between his parents and the young genius was so deep and impossible to ease that this he did not come to his father’s funeral, Boris Sidis, when the latter died in 1923 at the age of 56.
Significantly, William James Sidis did not cease to be scientifically active and continued to write articles and books under a pseudonym. In 1925 his collection of cosmological reflections “Animated and inanimate” was published, which was later rediscovered by the Harvard writer and futurologist Buckminster Fuller, who was delighted with the author’s genius manifested in them.
- He fell ill as a child. He has been living in an iron lung for almost 70 years
«William was the first to predict the existence of black holes, he showed the concept of the universe that appeared in the minds of scientists many years after the death of Sidis himself. This book is an example of genius and cosmology at the highest level “, wrote Buckminster Fuller in his 1983 work” Synergetics 2: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking “.
In 1930, William James Sidis received a patent for a perpetual rotating calendar that included leap years, and in 1935 he wrote an unpublished manuscript of “The Tribes and the States”, in which traced the contribution of Native Americans to American democracy.
In 1937, an article on William James Sidis was published in the New Yorker, in which his life was presented as marked by defeat and loneliness. William James Sidis began a long-term battle with the newspaper, which he sued for violation of privacy. In his opinion, the publication exposed him to public contempt, mockery and caused humiliation and “serious psychological distress”. The case ended in a settlement concluded in 1944, but it can be guessed that it left a huge mark on William James Sidis.
William James Sidis suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in 1944 and died at the age of 46 in Boston.