The day Steve Jobs called Walter Isaacson – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech
That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half-jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.
When Ben Franklin died, it was a loss, I have to imagine. But did they know, back then, that they’d lost Ben Franklin? Albert Einstein? Thomas Jefferson? Nikola Tesla?
It feels like that’s something of substance this morning as I tap away on my MacBook Pro because we know that yesterday, in so many ways, we lost our Ben Franklin. Albert Einstein. Thomas Jefferson. Nikola Tesla.