48. SIMON BOLIVAR 1783 - 1830.

Simon Bolivar is often called "the George Washington of South America" because of his role in the liberation of five South American countries (Colombia, Venezula, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) from Spanish rule. Few, if any, political figures have played so dominant a role in the history of an entire continent as he did.

Bolivar was born in 1783, in Caracas, Venezuela, into an aristocratic family of Spanish descent. He was orphaned at the age of nine. During his formative years, Bolivar was strongly influenced by the ideas and ideals of the French Enlightenment. Among the philosophers whose works he read were John Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.

As a young man, Bolivar visited several European countries. In Rome, in 1805, at the top of the Aventine Hill, Bolivar made his celebrated vow that he would not rest until his fatherland had been liberated from Spain.

In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and placed his own brother at the head of the Spanish government. By dislodging the Spanish royal family from effective political power, Napoleon provided the South American colonies with a golden opportunity to strike out for their own political independence.

The revolution against Spanish rule in

47. LOUIS DAGUERRE

1787 - 1851.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was the man who, in the late 1830s, succeeded in developing the first practical method of photography.

Daguerre was born in 1787, in the town of Cormeilles, in northern France. As a young man, he was an artist. In his mid-thirties, he designed the Diorama, a spectacular array of panoramic paintings exhibited with special lighting effects. While engaged in this work, he became interested in developing a mechanism for automatically reproducing views of the world without brushes and paint in other words, a camera.

His early attempts to devise a workable camera were unsuccessful. In 1827, he met Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who had likewise been trying (and up till then with somewhat greater success) to invent a camera. Two years later they became partners.In 1833, Niepce died, but Daguerre persisted in his efforts. By 1837, he had succeeded in developing a practical system of photography, called the
daguerreotype.

In 1839, Daguerre made his process public,

46. WERNER HEISENBERG

1901 - 1976.

Heiseenbery in 1933 (aged 32 ), as professor at Leipzig University.

In 1932, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Werner Karl Heisenberg, a German physicist, for his role in the creation of quantum mechanics, one of the most important achievements in the entire history of science.

Mechanics is that branch of physics which deals with the general laws governing the motion of material objects. It is the most fundamental branch of physics, which in turn is the most fundamental of the sciences. In the early years of the twentieth century, it gradually became apparent that the accepted laws of mechanics were unable to describe the behavior of extremely minute objects, such as atoms and subatomic particles. This was both distressing and puzzling, since the accepted laws worked superbly when applied to macroscopic objects (that is, to objects which were much larger than individual atoms).

In 1925, Werner Heisenberg proposed a new formulation of physics, one that was radically different in its basic concepts from the classical formulation of Newton. This new theory after some modification by

45. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

1770-1827.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the greatest of all musical composers, was born in 1770, in the city of Bonn, Germany. He exhibited talent at an early age, and his first published works date from 1783. As a young man, he visited Vienna, where he was introduced to Mozart; however, their acquaintance was fairly brief. In 1792, Beethoven returned to Vienna, and for a while he studied under Haydn, then the leading Viennese composer (Mozart had died the year before). Beethoven was to remain in Vienna, at that time the music capital of the world, for the remainder of his life.

Beethoven's immense virtuosity as a pianist impressed everyone, and he was successful both as a performer and a teacher. He soon became a prolific composer as

44.JOHN LOCKE(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

44. JOHN LOCKE 1632 - 1704.

  The famous English philosopher John Locke was the first writer to put together in coherent form the basic ideas of constitutional democracy. His ideas strongly influenced the founding fathers of the United States, as well as many leading philosophers of the French Enlightenment.

Locke was born in 1632, in Wring ton, England. He was educated at Oxford University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1656 and a master's degree in 1658. As a young man, he was very much interested in science, and at thirty-six was elected to the Royal Society. He became good friends with the famous chemist Robert Boyle, and later in his life became friends with Isaac Newton. He was also interested in medicine, and received a bachelor's degree in that field, though he only practiced occasionally.

A turning point in Locke's life was his acquaintance

43.ALEXANDER FLEMING(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

43. ALEXANDER FLEMING

1881-1955.

Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, was born in 1881, in Loch field, Scotland. After graduating from the medical school of St. Mary's Hospital in London, Fleming engaged in immunological research. Later, as an army doctor in World War I, he studied wound infections, and he noticed that many antiseptics injured the body cells even more than they injured the microbes. He realized that what was needed was some substance that, while it would harm bacteria, would not be harmful to human cells.

After the war, Fleming returned to St. Mary's Hospital. In 1922, while doing research there, he discovered a substance which he called lysozyme. Lysozyme, which

42.ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

42. ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1847-1922.

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847. Although he had only a few years of formal schooling, he was well educated by his family and himself. Bell's interest in the reproduction of vocal sounds arose quite naturally, since his father was an expert in vocal physiology, speech correction, and the teaching of the deaf.

Bell moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1871. It was there, in 1875, that he made the discoveries leading to his invention of the telephone. He filed a patent claim for his invention in February 1876, and it was granted a few weeks later. (It is interesting to note that another man, Elisha Gray, had filed a patent claim for a similar device on the same day as Bell, but