I'm looking for information on some of history’s most famous
"rivalries": the rivalry between Mozart and Saileri; the rivalry
between Dr. Denton Cooley and Dr. Michael DeBakey; and the like.
Please don’t limit your response to those two examples; a few (5-6)
more interesting “rivalries”(between philosophers, thinkers,
scientists etc) would be helpful.

Thank you.

---

Request for Question Clarification by scriptor-ga on 11 Dec 2002 15:46 PST

Dear nelofar,

I have started researching on your question and I have already
finished two articles on rivalries between scientists. Do you need the
completed answer very soon or do I have one or two additional days?
Also, do you want the rivalries Mozart / Salieri and Cooley / DeBakey
to be included under all circumstances, or do they only serve as
examples for the kind of rivalries you have in mind?

Regards,
Scriptor

---

Clarification of Question by nelofar-ga on 11 Dec 2002 22:00 PST

Hi,

Two days would be fine =) Yes, I would like the rivalries Mozart /
Salieri and Cooley / DeBakey to be included. If it helps, the focus of
my article is on the fact that rivalry between two great professionals
in their field leads to the best in them coming to the fore.

Thank you for all your help.

NELOFAR

Hi nelofar~

There are many famous rivalries to choose from, but these are some of
my favorites.

1. Mozart and Salieri

Despite the fact that the rivalry between these two fine composers is
known throughout the world (due to the play and subsequent film
"Amadeus"), there is very little evidence that the two men actually
had any rivalry at all.

While it is true that very few people know the music of Salieri today,
in his own time, Salieri was a deeply respected composer, and possibly
enjoyed even more success than Mozart did in his lifetime. And the
facts seem to point to the idea that Salieri not only didn't try to
sabotage Mozart's career, but that he helped him achieve several good
positions.

It is, true, however, that there was a rumor that Salieri killed
Mozart. This was primarily because Mozart believed he was being
poisoned, because a "man in grey" came to him anonymously
commissioning "Mass for the Dead" (The Requiem)...although Mozart
didn't believe him to be like his father...and that Salieri confessed
to murdering Mozart. However, the confessions didn't come till many
years later, when Salieri was in an asylum and utterly insane.

Historians believe that chances are slim that Salieri actually killed
Mozart. Salieri was not a close friend of Mozart's in any way. (If
Mozart had been poisoned, only someone close to him would have had the
opportunity to continually feed him poison.) In fact, historians now
believe that Mozart died from an attack of rheumatic fever--something
he had suffered frequently with as a child.

Therefore, the famous rivalry between these two 18th century composers
more than likely never existed.

For more information on the fact and myth aspect of this "rivalry,"
visit "Amadeus: Fact & Fiction:"
http://members.tripod.com/~wamozart/amadeus.html

and "Some Remarks on Amadeus:"
http://www.musicolog.com/m_amadeus_about.asp

For other rivalries between composers, visit:
http://media9.fastclick.net/w/safepop.cgi?mid=15366&sid=2131&id=97814&geo=279268203&len=76&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.web-helper.net%2FPDMusic%2FArticles%2F101910%2Farticle3.asp&c=13

2. Dr. Denton Cooley and Dr. Michael DeBakey	

In 1966, Dr. Michael DeBakey successfully implanted a partial
artificial heart. Three years later, a total artificial heart was
implanted in a patient by Dr. Denton Cooley, mentor of DeBakey. This
surgery was not without controversy, largely because the implant
patient died and his widow spoke out against the unnatural and
unconscious state of her husband after the surgery. Cooley had
performed the operation without permission from DeBakey,
and--upsetting DeBakey even more--without permission from any
regulatory body. This attitude of defiance could have given heart
transplants such a bad name, the science could have been lost
forever...or so DeBakey apparently felt. Cooley soon resigned from the
hospital at which he'd been practicing. In the end, however, without
DeBakey's careful research and surgery, and without Cooley's more
hurried approach, heart transplants might not be as advanced as they
are today.

3. Maria Callas and Renata Tabaldi

In the history of opera, there perhaps was never a rivalry so
discussed as that between Renata Tabaldi and Maria Callas. The two
singers seemed to be at the opposite end of the spectrum in so many
ways. Callas was trying to revolutionize opera; Tabaldi sang in a
traditional style. Callas spoke her mind and could be harsh and blunt;
Tabaldi smiled sweetly. Callas was something of the woman of the
world, while Tabaldi was portrayed in the press as a homely "good
girl." Callas was reported to have told her mother to jump out the
window if she couldn't earn enough to support herself; Tabaldi
seriously considered becoming a nun after her mother died. The two
battled over who would perform rival roles--and who performed them
best--all throughout their careers. In a much publicized incident,
Tabaldi admirers even held Callas responsible for Renata's removal
from La Scala. But, in the end, the two managed to work together
again--this time in concert...and even producing a recording of this
notable event, late in the life of their careers.

4. Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland	
	
These two actresses, both considered great in their Hollywood heydays,
were not only sisters, but bitter rivals. Perhaps it all began when
the two were in grade school, and Olivia instructed Joan never to
speak to her in front of her friends. But the first major affair
publicized about the two sisters' rivalry occurred in 1941, when they
were both nominated for best actress Academy Awards. Joan won, and was
the youngest actress to be given the award at the time. When Olivia
won her first Academy Award in 1947, her sister Joan perhaps was more
gracious; she congratulated Olivia--but received only disdain from her
sister. The incident was caught in a photograph and soon all the world
knew of the incident. Yet whatever their rivalries, they were still
sisters. Joan helped Olivia financially during hard times, and Olivia
sat beside Joan's bed when her sister grew gravely ill.

For more information on this and other rivalries between Hollywood
actresses, visit:
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/classic_actresses/94404
	
5. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray 

On Feb. 14, 1876, Elisha Gray filed an announcement with the U.S.
Patent Office, describing an apparatus "for transmitting vocal sounds
telegraphically." Unbeknownst to Gray, only two hours earlier
Alexander Graham Bell had applied for a patent on a similar apparatus.
It was soon discovered that the Gray's device worked, while Bell's did
not. What followed was years of litigation and bitterness--until Bell
was finally named the inventor of the telephone. The validity of that
finding is still debated to this day, however.

For more information, visit:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/telephone/peopleevents/pande02.html

6. Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge

The two men who introduced opalescent glass into art and decorating,
Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge, were bitter rivals and
competitors. In the 1870s, La Farge showed Tiffany some experiments he
was conducting with plating opalescent glass. A friendly act, no
doubt. Yet by the early 1880s, the two men seem to have become tangled
in litigation with each other about just who held the original patent
for opalescent glass windows. And for the next thirty years, the two
men fought. At one point Tiffany contracted work from a man who'd been
working with La Farge for years--only fueling the fire between them.
At times, it seemed La Farge was *the* man of opalescent glass...but
ultimately, it is Tiffany who is remembered for his remarkable glass
work.

For more details on their rivalry, please visit:
http://www.jlsloan.com/lct3.htm



Keywords Used:
Amadeus film fact
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Amadeus+film+fact&btnG=Google+Search

"Denton Cooley" "Michael DeBakey" controversy
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22Denton+Cooley%22+%22Michael+DeBakey%22+controversy&btnG=Google+Search
	
"Maria Callas" "Renata Tabaldi" rivalry
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Maria+Callas%22+%22Renata+Tebaldi%22+rivalry&spell=1
	
Hollywood actresses rivalry
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Hollywood+actresses+rivalry
	
"Louis Comfort Tiffany" "John La Farge" rivalry
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22Louis+Comfort+Tiffany%22+%22John+La+Farge%22+rivalry&btnG=Google+Search

Hope this helps! :)

kriswrite

Dear nelofar,

My fellow researcher kriswrite delivered a fine answer. However, I had
some more extensive examples in mind. That's why I thought I would
need more time.
I will add what I had written, so my work is not wasted. Maybe it's of
any value for you:

The rivalry between Othniel Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope might not be
famous in a way that makes popular movies; nevertheless, it is very
interesting since it took part before the background of a then very
young branch of natural science and its aftermaths can still be
recognized today.
Othniel Marsh (1831-1899) was the first professor of paleontology in
the United States. This discipline, the study of prehistoric fossils
of animals and plants, was still young when Marsh in 1870 led a
scientific expedition of the Yale University in Nebraska. He was
searching for remains of dinosaurs, a species still hardly explored in
those days, and he was successful. When the expedition returned in
December, they brought 38 boxes of fossils with them, among them a
bone of a pterodactyl, a giantic flying reptile.
Marsh's discoveries made him instantly famous, thus raising the
jealousy of his old friend, Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), who was a
renowned paleontologist himself. Cope tried to outclass Marsh by
finding and identifying more new species of North American dinosaurs
than his colleague, which made them bitter rivals. March did not
uncramp the situation when he publically pointed out that Cope had,
when reconstructing an elasmosaurus, mixed up the tail and the neck.
After that, Cope regarded Marsh his enemy. In 1872 they got into a
fight over who had rights to dig in Wyoming Territory and began luring
away each other's collectors in what became a ruthless competition for
fossils. This was the beginning of a rivalry that would enter the
history of science as "The Great Bone Wars". Both scientists sent out
field teams to collect as many fossils as only possible. Their crews
became known for fighting over newly discovered remains like armies.
They even blew up their opponents' and their own digging location with
dynamite if they regarded it necessary in order to keep the others
from finding fossils. If everything else failed, they sometimes stole
what the opponent team had dug up.
Both paleontologists wanted, from the tons and tons of fossils sent to
them by their teams, to identify and name more new dinosaurs than the
rival, at the disadvantage of scientific accurateness. Cope and Marsh
identified 133 new dinosaur species in only 20 years, but since their
ambition became stronger than their diligence, they misidentified many
or double-named others.
The two men carried their personal war to Washington DC and into the
newspapers. At the end, both men's reputations were ruined and the
United States Government refused any further funding of
paleontological research.
And as a result of their ambition-driven way of analyzing the fossils,
of the 133 species the rivals identified, only 34 are regarded valid
today. 47 are classified as invalid, the remaining 52 are classified
"dubious".

--

Less harmful for the reputation of the persons involved, and also
fought with far less extreme methods, was the rivalry between Sir
Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).
The two men belonged to the last real universal geniuses; they were
philosophers, physicists, natural scientists and mathematicians, to
name but a few of their fields of work. Independantly, they both
developed over many years a mathematical principle dealing with the
geometry of infinitesimals, the "calculus". Since 1673, Leibniz knew
that Newton was also working on the calculus, but he had no knowledge
of the particular approaches and methods his British colleague was
using. In fact, Newton had already written his tract on the calculus,
"De Methodis Serierum et Fluxionum", with a full solution to the
mathematical problems involved, as early as 1671; but he failed to get
it published, and it wouldn't see print before 1736. Finally, in
November 1675, Leibniz had developed a working calculus, which he
called Infinitesmalrechnung and used in a manuscript.
Newton, alarmed that someone else might be trying to harvest what he
sowed, wrote a letter to Leibniz which listed the results of his own
approaches, but did not include a desciption of his methods. The
consequence was that Leibniz now felt under pressure to quickly
publish a fuller account of his own methods and intensified his work.
In his second letter to the German mathematician from October 1676,
which did not arrive in Hannover before June 1677, Newton made clear
he believed that Leibniz had stolen his methods. To demonstrate that
he was using methods he had developed himself, Leibniz gave some
details of the principles of his differential calculus in his reply.
But that did not convince Newton at all; he was still sure that
Leibniz was nothing but a thief of intellectual property and that he
had stolen the calculus when he had the opportunity to read
unpublished scientific manuscripts at the Royal Society in London
during a visit in England in 1673. His rage was growing, and came to a
climax when Leibniz published his calculus version in 1684 as "Nova
Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis". This made Leibniz in the eyes of the
scientific world the inventor of the new mathematical principle. The
result was the "Priority Conflict" between the two scientists: For the
next decades, Newton would not miss a single opportunity to depict
Leibniz as a liar, thief and impostor, while Leibniz would, for the
rest of his life, have to defend himself. The followers of both men
were also involved in that conflict, writing polemic pamphlets and
scientific essays to defend or attack either Newton or Leibniz and
their adherers. The affair became a scandal, as British mathematicians
asserted Newton’s claims before the public while their Continental
colleagues hotly defended Leibniz’s priority. Even after Leibniz's
death in 1716 the conflict went on. And though the facts are known
today and most historians and mathematicians agree that both Leibniz
and Newton deserve the honor of having developed the calculus, it
still is the reason for controversies sometimes...

Sources:

Wie der Brontosaurus zum Apatosaurus wurde, by Gerhard Winter, 1997
http://www.senckenberg.uni-frankfurt.de/private/gwinter/apato.htm

Utah History To Go: Rivals Fought Tooth and Nail Over Dinosaurs, by
Will Bagley, 2001
http://historytogo.utah.gov/hmnail.html

Today In Science History: 29 October
http://www.todayinsci.com/cgi-bin/indexpage.pl?http://www.todayinsci.com/10/10_29.htm

The History of Calculus, by Dan Cardamore
http://www.hld.ca/school/First_Year/hist_calc.html

Pausenhof.de: Biografien - Sir Isaac Newton
http://www.pausenhof.de/biographien/bion001.asp

The Newton/Leibniz Conflict in Context, by Anand Kandaswamy
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~cherlin/History/Papers2002/newton.html

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, by the University of St Andrews,
Scotland, 1998
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Leibniz.html

Sir Isaac Newton, by the University of St Andrews, Scotland, 1998
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Newton.html

Newton und Leibniz, by  Werner Bäni, 2002 
http://www.hta-bu.bfh.ch/hta/mat/newton-leibniz.htm

Is your question limited to scientist, or are you interested in
statesmen/founding fathers?  One of the most interesting rivalries (to
me anyway) was that between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, which
resulted in the death of Hamilton.
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/vp/vpburr.html

Thank you very much for all the time and effort you've put into my
question; I really appreciate it.

The rivalry between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton sounds very
interesting-- I'd love to know more about it.

Thank you.

How about a rivalry between comedians? Jack Benny and Fred Allan comes to mind.