J. Barzun on Christopher Colombus, cranks, and innovators:

"The whole saga, including the sailors' distrust and their leader's deliberate deception; the success and the mistake at the heart of it; the glorification followed by the disgrace during and after the second voyage (the hero led back in chains); the persistence and the final neglect and poverty—every feature of his career is part of a typical pattern. Not all, but many of the great achievements of western man have followed this tortuous course, visiting more or less harsh punishment on the doers. This "tradition" is not the result of perversity. It is not the clash of stupid men opposing an intelligent one: Columbus's interviewers were right to question his calculation of the distance to India: he made it 2,400 miles short of the actual 10,600. And it is true that the promoters of the really new more often look and talk like cranks and mis-state or mistake their goal. Their behavior is often arrogant or seems so from their impatience with cautious minds. The upshot—humiliation and penury—is disproportionate to the offense, but it expresses the culture's need to defend its rational ways, to ward off genuine cranks, and to avoid moving too fast into the untried. There is no evidence that the present system of subsidizing innovations—government and foundation grants—works any better than that of the kings and queens of earlier times: the same committee is always sitting at the gate."