Who is the most overrated figure in history?

Reputations built on other people's work, other people's poems and a few well-placed memoirs. Nobody here is a nobody, which is what makes it an argument.

1

Christopher Columbus

Credited with a discovery he did not make, in a place he misidentified until he died.

1000pts

2

Thomas Edison

Held over a thousand patents and a reputation for taking credit earned in his own workshops.

600pts

3

Ferdinand Magellan

Credited with the first circumnavigation despite dying less than halfway round.

551pts

4

Marie Antoinette

Remembered for a sentence she never said and a frivolity her letters do not support.

494pts

5

Cleopatra

Famous for a beauty no contemporary described and remembered mostly through Roman propaganda.

494pts

6

Alexander the Great

Inherited the best army in the world from his father and is rarely asked to share the credit.

350pts

7

Paul Revere

One of several riders that night, and the only one Longfellow put in a poem.

257pts

8

Richard the Lionheart

England's warrior-king icon who spent about six months of a ten-year reign in the country.

257pts

9

Napoleon Bonaparte

Brilliant at sixty battles and remembered less for the two that finished him.

257pts

10

Nikola Tesla

A genuinely great engineer turned into an internet saint who supposedly invented everything.

257pts

11

Julius Caesar

Wrote the definitive account of his own campaigns, which is one way to secure a reputation.

257pts

12

Henry Ford

Did not invent the car or the assembly line, but got his name on both.

257pts

13

Winston Churchill

Topped a national poll of greatest Britons, and remains the subject of the fiercest reputational argument of any of them.

143pts

14

Amelia Earhart

A real pioneer whose fame rests more on how she disappeared than on what she flew.

143pts