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