IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Rick Thomas rbthomas at lilypad.rutgers.edu
Wed Sep 23 11:37:57 EST 1998


MA Lloyd <malloy00 at io.com> writes:

>FWIW the most popular work playing this game is probably Michael H Hart's
>The 100.  His ordering can of course be debated, but it isn't too bad; I
>doubt you can make a decent case for anybody he hasn't put in the top 25.  
>His entries in the top 25 that fall into this millennium are Newton, 
>Gutenberg, Columbus, Einstein, Pasteur, Galileo, Darwin, Copernicus, 
>Lavoisier, Watt, Faraday, Maxwell, and Luther.

Of that list, my money's on Gutenberg. Movable type lead to cheap
books (and perhaps more important, cheap pamphlets and cheap
newspapers.) That led to a dissemination of learning and,
consequently, political and economic power to the non-aristocratic
classes.  In turn, that created the opportunities for all the rest of
those guys to do their things, and for all the rest of us to find out
about them.

Now that's what I call changing the course of history.

My 2 cents...

Rick


PS -- It's worth pointing out that Gutenberg himself was a lousy
businessman.  If it had been left to him, the invention of movable
type would have been a mere footnote in the history books (which books
would themselves only exist in limited editions in aristocratic
libraries.)  The people who really changed history were Gutenberg's
creditors, who, in an effort to recoup some of the money they had
lent him, took his idea and commercialized it.



More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net