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