Of course, you have to be careful, as Carl Sagan said:

"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

And for that matter they were right to laugh at Columbus, whose estimate of the distance from Europe to China were ludicrously wrong. He would certainly have starved to death less than halfway to his destination if he hadn't had the enormous luck to run into a unknown continent on the way (which he was too stupid to realize wasn't China).