Working on his doctorate at the University of Uppsala in 1884, 25 year old Swedish student Svante August Arrhenius submitted his 150-page dissertation on electrolytic conductivity.

It did not go over well.

He was a brilliant student and recognized as such, but his professors, led by Per Teodor Cleve, grilled him on his preposterous idea that ions, which were already recognized as electrically charged particles, were actually atoms, as the only means of explaining the behavior of certain solutions that conducted electric currents.

“Struntprat, herr Arrhenius!” exclaimed Professor Cleve. “Du har uppenbarligen läst för många Jules Verne-romanser. Ditt huvud är fullt av omöjliga idéer.”

[“Nonsense, Mr. Arrhenius! Clearly you’ve been reading too many Jules Verne romances. Your head is full of impossible ideas.”]

Or something similar.

Cleve consulted with his fellow professors. They recognized that Arrhenius was a top notch student, but his speculations just would not do. Reluctantly they passed him, but at the lowest level possible, and Arrhenius received a fourth class degree.

Nineteen years later in 1903, Svante August Arrhenius was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that very paper that his professors found so hard to swallow.

By that time the electron had been discovered and Arrhenius’s theory made sense to even the most conservative of scientists.

He was the first Swedish Nobel laureate, and in 1905 he became the director of the Nobel Institute.