Gadflies and geniuses in the history of gas theory

The history of science has often been presented as a story of the achieveme nts of geniuses: Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Darwin, Einstein. Recently it ha s become popular to enrich this story by discussing the social contexts and motivations that may have influenced the work of the genius and its accept ance; or to replace it by accounts of the doings of scientists who have no claim to genius or to discoveries of universal importance but may be typica l members of the scientific community at a particular time and place. In th is article I consider a different type of story, which further research mig ht reveal to be more common than we now suspect: progress stimulated by gad flies - outspoken critics who challenge the ideas of geniuses, forcing them to revise and improve those ideas, resulting in new knowledge for which th e genius gets the credit while the gadfly is forgotten.