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

41.OLIVER CROMWELL(THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PERSONS IN HISTORY) History Of Sand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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