Mad scientists are fun fictional characters—visionaries who hole up alone (sometimes in a garage? or maybe a remote castle?) to drive human progress. It’s a romantic notion, but one that doesn’t really hold up in real life. History’s innovators would be nowhere without their rivals. Rivalries are behind some of the world’s biggest achievements. In the 19th century Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla fought the current wars. Two hundred years earlier, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz battled over calculus. And two centuries before that, there was Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti, two men whose rivalry was part of the cauldron of competition known as the Renaissance.
The two competed in 1418 to design the dome atop Florence’s Duomo, but their first encounter took place nearly two decades earlier in a contest to create a set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery (which sits across from the Duomo). Ghiberti came out on top the first time, and Brunelleschi won the rematch. Their rivalry set the tone for an era that produced some of the world’s greatest artworks, architecture, and competitions the world has ever seen. These and many more for you at National Geographic History magazine May 2022 issue

Amy Briggs, Executive Editor

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