History Of Sand: April 2015

Sunday, April 26, 2015

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

41. OLIVER CROMWELL

1599-1658.

Oliver Cromwell, the brilliant and inspiring military leader who led the Parliamentary forces to victory in the English Civil War, is the man most responsible for the eventual establishment of parliamentary democracy as the English form of government.

Cromwell was born in 1599, in Huntingdon, England. As a young man, he lived in an England torn by religious dissensions and governed by a king who believed in and wished to practice absolute monarchy. Cromwell himself was a farmer and a country gentleman, and a devout Puritan. In 1628, he was elected to Parliament; but he served only briefly, because the following year King Charles I decided to dismiss Parliament and govern the country

40.PLATO(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

40. PLATO 427 B.C. - 347 B.C.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato represents the starting point of Western political philosophy, and of much of our ethical and metaphysical thought as well. His speculations on these subjects have been read and studied for over 2,300 years. Plato stands, therefore, as one of the great fathers of Western thought.

Plato was born into a distinguished Athenian family, in about 427 B.C. As a young man, he made the acquaintance of the noted philosopher Socrates, who became his friend and mentor. In 399 B.C., Socrates, then seventy years old, was tried on rather vague charges of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates was condemned,
sentenced to death, and executed. The execution of

39.ADOLF HITLER(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

39. ADOLF HITLER 1889 - 1945.

I must confess that it is with a feeling of disgust that I include Adolf Hitler in this book. His influence was almost entirely pernicious, and I have no desire to honor a man whose chief importance lies in his having caused the deaths of some thirty-five million people. However, there is no getting away from the fact that Hitler had an enormous influence upon the lives of a very great number of persons.

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889, in Braunau, Austria. As a young man, he was an unsuccessful artist, and sometime during his youth he became an ardent German nationalist. During World War I, he served in the German army, was wounded, and received two medals for bravery.

Germany's defeat left him shocked and angered. In

38. GUGLIELMO MARCONI

1874 - 1937.

Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1874. His family was quite well-to-do, and he was educated by private tutors. In 1894, when he was twenty years old, Marconi read of the experiments that Heinrich Hertz had performed a few years earlier. Those experiments had clearly demonstrated the existence of invisible electromagnetic waves, which move through the air with the speed of light.

Marconi was immediately fired by the idea that these waves could be used to send signals across great distances without wires. This would provide many possibilities of communication that were not

37.WILLIAM T. G. MORTON(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

37. WILLIAM T. G. MORTON

1819-1868.

The name of William Thomas Green Morton may not ring a bell in the minds of most readers. He was, however, a far more influential person than many more famous men, for Morton was the man principally responsible for the introduction of the use of anesthesia in surgery.

Few inventions in all of history are so highly valued by individual human beings as anesthetics, and few have made as profound a difference in the human condition. The grimness of surgery in the days when a patient had to be awake while a surgeon sawed through his bones is frightful to contemplate.The ability to put an end to this kind of pain is certainly one of the greatest gifts that any man ever gave to his fellows.

Morton was born in 1819, in Charlton, Massachusetts. As a young man, he studied at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. In 1842, he began the practice of dentistry. For a while, in 1842 and 1843, he was the partner of Horace Wells, a slightly older dentist who was himself interested in anesthesia. It seems, however, that their partnership was not profitable, and it ended in late 1843.

A year later, Wells began experimenting with nitrous oxide

36. ANTONY VAN LEEUWENHOEK

1632-1723.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the man who discovered microbes, was born in 1632, in the town of Delft, in the Netherlands. He came from a middle-class family, and for most of his adult life held a minor post with the town government.

Leeuwenhoek's great discovery came about because he had taken up microscopy as a hobby. In those days, of course, one could not purchase microscopes in a store, and Leeuwenhoek constructed his own instruments. He was never a professional lens grinder, nor did he ever receive formal instruction in the field; but the skill he developed was truly remarkable, far exceeding that of any of the professionals of his day.

Although the compound microscope had been invented a generation before he was born, Leeuwenhoek did not make use of it. Instead, by very careful and accurate grinding of small lenses of very short focal length, Leeuwenhoek was able to attain a resolving power greater than that of any of the early compound microscopes. One of his surviving lenses has a magnifying power of about 270

35. THOMAS EDISON

1847 - 1931.

The versatile inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born in 1847, in the town of Milan, Ohio. He had only three months of formal education, and his schoolmaster considered him to be retarded!

Edison created his first invention, an electric vote-recorder, when he was only twenty-one years old. It did not sell, and thereafter Edison concentrated on inventing objects that he expected would be readily marketable. Not long after the vote-recorder, he invented an improved stock ticker system which he sold for forty thousand dollars, a tremendous sum in those days. A series of other inventions followed, and Edison was soon both wealthy and famous. Probably his most original invention was the phonograph, which he patented in 1877. More important to the world, however, was his development of a practical incandescent light bulb in 1879.

Edison was not the first to invent an electrical lighting system. A few years earlier, electric arc lamps had been utilized for street

34. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

1769 - 1821.

The celebrated French general and emperor, Napoleon I, was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, in 1769. His original name vas Napoleone Buonaparte. France had acquired Corsica only some fifteen months before his birth, and in his early years, Napoleon was a Corsican nationalist who considered the French to be oppressors. Nevertheless, Napoleon was sent to military academies in France, and when he graduated in 1785, at the age of sixteen, he became a second lieutenant in the French army.

Four years later, the French Revolution erupted, and within a few years, the new French government was involved in wars with several foreign powers. Napoleon's first opportunity to distinguish himself came in 1793, at the siege of Toulon (in which the French recaptured the city from the British), where he was in charge of the artillery. (By this time he had abandoned his Corsican nationalist ideas and considered himself a Frenchman.) His accomplishments at Toulon won him promotion to brigadier general, and in 1796, he

33.ALEXANDER THE GREAT(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

33.ALEXANDER THE GREAT

3 5 6 B.C. - 3 2 3 B.C.

Alexander the Great, the most celebrated conqueror of the ancient world, was born in 356 B.C, in Pella, the capital city of Macedonia. His father, King Philip II of Macedon, was a man of truly outstanding ability and foresight. Philip enlarged and reorganized the Macedonian army, and converted it into a fighting force of the highest caliber. He first used this army to conquer surrounding regions to the north of Greece, and then turned south and conquered most of Greece itself. Next, Philip created a federation of the Greek city-states, with himself as leader. He was planning to make war on the vast Persian Empire to the east of Greece; indeed, the invasion had already commenced, in 336 B.C, when Philip, still only forty-six years old, was assassinated.

Alexander was only twenty years old when his father died, but he succeeded to the throne without difficulty. Philip had carefully prepared his son to succeed him, and the young Alexander already had considerable military experience. Nor had his father neglected

32. JOHN DALTON 1766-1844.

John Dalton was the English scientist who, in the early nineteenth century, introduced the atomic hypothesis into the main stream of science. By so doing, he provided the key idea that made possible the enormous progress in chemistry since his day.

To be sure, he was not the first person to suggest that all material objects are composed of vast numbers of exceedingly small, indestructible particles called atoms. That notion had been suggested by the ancient Greek philosopher, Democritus (460-370 B.c.?), and probably even earlier. The hypothesis was adopted by Epicurus (another Greek philosopher), and was brilliantly presented by the Roman writer, Lucretius (died: 55 B.c.), in his famous poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).

Democritus's theory (which had not been accepted by Aristotle) was neglected during the Middle Ages, and had little effect on

31.EDWARD DE VERE

better known as

"WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE"

1550 - 1604.

The great British playwright and poet, William Shakespeare, is generally acknowledged to be the greatest writer who ever lived. There is a good deal of dispute about his identity (which will be discussed below), but the talent and achievements of the author are agreed to by all.

Shakespeare wrote at least thirty-six plays, including such masterpieces as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, and Othello, a magnificent set of 154 sonnets, and a few longer poems. In view of his genius, accomplishments, and deserved fame, it may seem a bit odd that his name does not appear higher on this list. I have ranked Shakespeare this low not because I am unappreciative of his artistic accomplishments, but only because of my belief that, in general, literary and artistic figures have had comparatively little influence on human history.

The activities of a religious leader, scientist, politician, explorer, or philosopher frequently influence developments in many other fields of human endeavor. For example, scientific advances have

30.ADAM SMITH(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

30. ADAM SMITH 1723 - 1790.

Adam Smith, the leading figure in the development of economic theory, was born in 1723, in the town of Kirkcaldy, Scotland. As a young man, he studied at Oxford University, and from 1751 to 1764 he was a professor of philgsophy at Glasgow University. While there, he published his first book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, which established his reputation in intellectual circles. However, his lasting fame rests primarily on his great work, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. The book was an immediate success, and for the rest of his life Smith enjoyed fame and respect. He died in Kirkcaldy, in 1790. Smith had no children and never married.

Adam Smith was not the first person to devote himself to economic

29. GENGHIS KHAN C.1162 - 1227.

Genghis Khan, the great Mongol conqueror, was born about 1162. His father, a petty Mongol chieftain, named the boy Temujin, after a defeated rival chieftain. When Temujin was nine, his father was killed by members of a rival tribe, and for some years the surviving members of the family lived in constant danger and privation. This was an inauspicious beginning, but Temujin's situation was to become a lot worse before it got better. When he was a young man, he was captured in a raid by a rival tribe. To prevent his escaping, a wooden collar was placed around his neck. From this extremity of helplessness, as an illiterate prisoner in a primitive, barren country, Temujin rose to become the most powerful man in the world.

His rise started when he managed to escape from his captors. He

28. ORVILLE WRIGHT 1871-1948

&

WILBUR WRIGHT 1867-1912.

Since the achievements of these two brothers are so closely intertwined, they have been combined as a single entry, and their stories will be told together. Wilbur Wright was born in 1867, in Mill ville, Indiana. Orville Wright, his brother, was born in 1871, in Dayton, Ohio. Both boys received high school educations, although neither actually received his diploma.

Both boys were mechanically gifted, and both were interested in the subject of manned flight. In 1892, they opened a shop where they sold, repaired, and manufactured bicycles. This provided funds for their overriding interest, which was aeronautical research. They eagerly read the writings of other workers in aeronautics - Otto Lilienthal, Octave Chanute, and Samuel P. Langley. In 1899, they started working on the problem of flight themselves. By December 1903, after a little more than four years'

27. KARL MARX 1818 - 1883.

Karl Marx, the principal originator of "scientific socialism,^" was born in 1818, in the town of Trier, Germany. His father was a lawyer, and at seventeen Karl entered the University of Bonn to study law himself. Later, however, he transferred to the University of Berlin, and he eventually was awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Jena.

Marx then turned to journalism, and for a while he was the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. But his radical political views soon got him into trouble, and he moved to Paris. There he met Friedrich Engels, and the close personal and political friendship they formed was to endure for the rest of their lives. Though each wrote several books in his own name, their intellectual collaboration was so close that their combined output can reasonably be treated as a single joint achievement. Indeed,

26. GEORGE WASHINGTON

1732 - 1799.

George Washington was born in 1732, in Wakefield, Virginia. The son of a wealthy planter, he inherited a substantial estate when he was twenty years old. From 1753 to 1758, Washington served in the army, taking an active part in the French and Indian War, and gaining military experience and prestige. He returned to Virginia in late 1758, and resigned his commission. Shortly thereafter, he married Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow with two children. (He had no children of his own.)

Washington spent the next fifteen years

25. MARTIN LUTHER 1483 - 1546.

Martin Luther, the man whose defiance of the Roman Catholic Church inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, was born in 1483, in the town of Eisleben, in Germany. He received a good university education, and for a while (apparently at his father's suggestion) he studied law. However, he did not complete his legal education, but instead chose to become an Augustinian monk. In 1512, he received the degree of Doctor of Theology from the University of Wattenberg, and soon thereafter joined its faculty.

Luther's grievances against the Church arose gradually. In 1510, he had taken a trip to Rome, and had been shocked at the

24.JAMES CLERK MAXWELL(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

24. JAMES CLERK MAXWELL

1831 - 1879.

The great British physicist James Clerk Maxwell is best known for his formulation of the set of four equations that express the basic laws of electricity and magnetism.

Those two fields had been investigated extensively for many years before Maxwell, and it was well known that they were closely related. However, although various laws of electricity and magnetism had been discovered that were true in special circumstances, before Maxwell there was no overall, unified theory. In his set of four short (though highly sophisticated)equations, Maxwell was able to describe exactly the behavior and interaction of the electric and magnetic fields. By so doing, he transformed a confusing mass of phenomena into a single, comprehensive theory. Maxwell's equations have been employed extensively for the past century in both theoretical and applied science.

The great virtue of Maxwell's equations is that they are general

23.MICHAEL FARADAY(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

23. MICHAEL FARADAY 1791 - 1867.

This is the age of electricity. It is true that our era is sometimes called the space age and sometimes called the atomic age; however, space travel and atomic weapons, whatever their potential importance, have relatively little impact upon our everyday lives. But we use electrical devices constantly. In fact, it seems safe to say that no technological feature so completely permeates the modern world as does the use of electricity.

Many men have contributed to our mastery of electricity:Charles Augustine de Coulomb, Count Alessandro Volta, Hans Christian Oersted, and Andre Marie Ampere are among the most important. But towering far above the others are two great British scientists, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Though the work of the two men was in part complementary, they were in no sense collaborators, and each man's individual achievements entitle him to a high place on this list.

Michael Faraday was born in 1791, in Newing ton, England. He came from a poor family and was largely self educated. Apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller at the age of fourteen, he used the opportunity to read extensively. When he was

22.JAMES WATT(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

22. JAMES WATT 1736 - 1819.

The Scottish inventor James Watt, the man who is often described as the inventor of the steam engine, was the key figure of the Industrial Revolution.

Actually, Watt was not the first man to build a steam engine. Similar devices were described by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century. In 1698, Thomas Savery patented a steam engine that was used for pumping water, and in 1712 an Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, patented a somewhat improved version. Still, the Newcomen engine had such a low efficiency that it was useful only for pumping water out of coal mines.

Watt himself became interested in the steam engine in 1764, while repairing a model of Newcomen's device. Watt, although he had received only one year's training as an instrument maker, had great inventive talent. The improvements which he made upon Newcomen's invention were so important that it is fair to consider Watt the inventor of the first practical steam engine.

Watt's first great improvement, which he patented in 1769,was the addition of a separate condensing chamber. He also insulated the steam cylinder, and in 1782 he invented the double acting engine. Together with some smaller improvements, these innovations resulted in an increase in the efficiency of the steam engine by a factor of four or more. In practice, this increase of efficiency meant the difference between a clever but not really very useful device, and an instrument of enormous industrial utility.

Watt also invented (in 1781) a set of gears for converting the reciprocal motion of the engine into a rotary motion. This device greatly increased the number of uses to which steam engines could be put. Watt also invented a centrifugal governor (1788), by which the speed of the engine could be automatically controlled; a pressure gauge (1790); a counter; an indicator; and a throttle valve, in addition to various other improvements.

Watt himself did not have a good head for business. However, in 1775 he formed a

21.CONSTANTINE THE GREAT(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

21.CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

c. 280-337.

Constantine the Great was the first Christian emperor of Rome. By his adoption of Christianity, and by his various policies encouraging its growth, he played a major role in transforming it from a persecuted sect into the dominant religion of Europe.

Constantine was born about 280, in the town of Naissus (present day N^g), in what is now Yugoslavia. His father was a high ranking army officer, and Constantine spent his younger days in Nico media, where the court of the Emperor Diocletian was situated.

Diocletian abdicated in 305, and Constantine's father, Constantius, became the ruler of the western half of the Roman Empire. When Constantius died the following year, Constantine was proclaimed emperor by his troops. Other generals, however, disputed his claim, and a series of civil wars followed. These ended in 312 when Constantine defeated his remaining rival, Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, near Rome.

Constantine was now the undisputed ruler of the western half of the Empire; however, another general, Licinius, ruled the eastern

20.ANTOINE LAURENT LAVOISIER(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

20. ANTOINE LAURENT LAVOISIER

1743 - 1794.

The great French scientist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier was the most important figure in the development of chemistry. At the time of his birth, in Paris, in 1743, the science of chemistry lagged far behind physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Large numbers of individual facts had been discovered by chemists, but there was no adequate theoretical framework in which to fit these isolated bits of information. At that time, it was incorrectly believed that air and water were elementary substances. Worse still, there was a complete misunderstanding of the nature of fire. It was believed that all combustible materials contained a hypothetical substance called "phlogiston,^" and that during combustion the inflammable substance released its phlogiston into the air.

In the interval from 1754 to 1774, talented chemists such as Joseph Black, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, and others had isolated such important gases as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon

19.NICOLAUS COPERNICUS(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

19. NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
1473 - 1543.

The great Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (Polish name: Mikolaj Kopernik), was born in 1473, in the city of Torun, on the Vistula River, in Poland. He came from a well-to-do family. As a young man, Copernicus studied at the University of Cracow, where he became interested in astronomy. In his mid-twenties he went to Italy, where he studied law and medicine at the Universities of Bologna and Padua, and later received a doctorate in canon law from the University of Ferrara. Copernicus spent most of his adult life on the staff of the cathedral at Frauen burg (Polish: Frombork), where he was a canon. Copernicus was never a professional astronomer, and the great work which has made him famous was accomplished in his spare time.

During his stay in Italy, Copernicus had become acquainted with the idea of the Greek philosopher, Aristarchus of Samos (third century B.c.), that the earth and the other planets revolved about the sun. Copernicus became convinced of the correctness of this heliocentric hypothesis, and when he was about forty he began to circulate among his friends a short, handwritten manuscript setting

18.AUGUSTUS CAESAR(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

18.AUGUSTUS CAESAR

63 B.C. - 14 A.D.

Augustus Caesar, the founder of the Roman Empire, is one of the great pivotal figures in history. He ended the civil wars that had disrupted the Roman Republic during the first century B.C., and he reorganized the Roman government so that internal peace and prosperity were maintained for two centuries.

Gaius Octavius (better known as Octavian; he did not receive the title "Augustus" until he was thirty-five years old) was born in 63 B.C. He was the grandnephew of Julius Caesar, who was the leading political figure of Rome during Octavian's youth. Julius Caesar, who had no legitimate sons of his own, liked the youth, and helped prepare him for a political career. However,when Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.c., Octavian was still only an eighteen-year-old student.

The death of Caesar set off a long and bitter struggle for power between various Roman military and political figures. At first, his rivals, who were all men of long experience in the rough arena of Roman politics, did not consider the youthful Octavian a serious threat. Indeed, the young man's only visible asset was that Julius Caesar had adopted him as his son. By making skillful use of this advantage, Octavian managed to win the support of some of

17.SHIH HUANG TI(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

17. SHIH HUANG TI 259 B.C. - 210 B.C.

The great Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti, who ruled from 238-210 B.C, united China by force of arms and instituted a set of sweeping reforms. Those reforms have been a major factor in the cultural unity that China has maintained ever since.

Shih Huang Ti (also known as Ch'in Shih Huang Ti) was born in 259 B.C. and died in 210 B.C. To understand his importance, it is necessary to have some knowledge of the historical background of his times. He was born in the final years of the Chou dynasty, which had been founded about 1100 B.C. Centuries before his time, however, the Chou monarchs had ceased to be effective rulers, and China had become divided into a large number of feudal states.

The various feudal lords were constantly at war with one

16.CHARLES DARWIN(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

16. CHARLES DARWIN 1809 - 1882.

Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of organic evolution by means of natural selection, was born in Shrews bury, England, on February 12, 1809 (on exactly the same day that Abraham Lincoln was born). At sixteen, he entered the University of Edinburgh to study medicine; however, he found both medicine and anatomy dull subjects, and after a while transferred to Cambridge to study for the ministry. At Cambridge, he found such activities as riding and shooting far more agreeable than his studies. Nevertheless, he managed to impress one of his professors sufficiently to be recommended for the position of naturalist on the exploratory voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle. His father at first objected to Charles's accepting the appointment, feeling that such a trip would simply be a further excuse for the young man to delay settling down to serious work. Fortunately, the elder Darwin was persuaded to give his consent to the trip, for this was to prove one of the most rewarding ocean voyages in the history of Western science.

Darwin set sail on the Beagle in 1831, at the age of twenty-two. In the course of the next five years, the Beagle sailed around the world, skirting the coasts of South America at a leisurely pace, exploring the lonely Galapagos Islands, and visiting other islands of the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the South Atlantic. During the long course of the voyage, Darwin saw many natural wonders, visited primitive tribes, discovered large numbers of fossils, and

Sunday, April 26, 2015

43. ALEXANDER FLEMING

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

42. ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

41. OLIVER CROMWELL

Monday, April 20, 2015

Sunday, April 19, 2015