> If blogs had existed in 1900 and a certain patent clerk had written a post on his ideas about clock synchronization somehow being related to electromagnetism, many would have dismissed him as a crackpot as well.

That "certain patent clerk" was hardly working in a vacuum; not only was he building upon the work of others (e.g. Lorentz just to pick someone) but he had been in school with some of them and was in constant communication with them, as he was hardly the only one working on the problem.

This is not to minimize his brilliance (Special Relativity in particular has that wonderful property of being completely obvious once explained...but that you could almost see before the explanation but yet nobody had previously characterized) and the mind blowing nature of his three-paper year. But when published his work fell on fertile ground.