The Man Who Translated Everything Wrong
He proposed germ theory two centuries before Pasteur, built one of Europe's first public museums, and enjoyed the patronage of four popes. He was also wrong about nearly everything — including the hieroglyphics he had chiseled, in stone, into a fountain that still stands in Piazza Navona. Meet Athanasius Kircher: the most confident man in seventeenth-century Europe.
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