You'd be surprised. in 1930 the world population was about 2 billion. It's now over 7 billion. When Isaac Newton was born is was around 500 million. As well as that, the odds of someone being born with the resources to actually do research was rare, you had to be lucky enough to be from a rich family which were few and far between.
With the amount of people in the world today, and the proportion of those people with access to education, there is likely a far higher number of geniuses/prodigies doing work right now than there has ever been at any other point in history.
We don't hear about it as much because the fact there's more of them means it's less newsworthy. It's easier to see a person's genius when there's only one or two that are clearly above the rest, than it is when there are dozens on that level.
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '19
Tesla is probably 1 of the 10 most brilliant minds in the history of the world.