If you want to look anywhere for the moment when the Romantic idea of genius—the tubercular poet communing with nature—yielded to the modern one—of a workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation - look to this New Jersey hamlet in the late 1870s.

The Matthew Effect plays into the Great Man theory of history…. We find it intuitively easy to understand human-sized stories, where someone does something, whereas vague wafts of social change driven by multiple factors might get academics excited... but tend to leave everyone else bored to tears.

… ‘genius' functions as a mythology rather than an objective category. A genius needs a story as well as achievements.

In Galton's words, we can see the foundation stones of the modern idea of genius. It is a rare gift, possessed by individuals, which allows them to achieve greatness.

We have a set of stories about what geniuses are, and how they work, and how singular their achievements are—stories that are often entirely untrue.