A&E's Top 100 People of the Millenium

Great Debates
41

I learned long ago to ignore “100 GReatest ____ of all time” and “Top Ten” lists (except for David Letterman’s) from ANY source. Even when I AGREE with the rankings, they’re still a silly idea at best, and usually a cheap gimmick to sell something.
I mean, I AGREE that James Jouce’s “Ulysses” is a great novel, but that list of the top 100 literary masterpieces was OBVIOUSLY a gimmick to sell books.

And when a TV station/program puts such a list together (whether it’s this A & E list or the ESPN top athletes list), it’s BOUND to be filled with undeserving candidates, chosen solely for being telegenic or controversial.

I mean, A & E wants ratings- so does it surprise ANYONE that Lady Di is deemed the equal of Gutenberg, Napoleon, Mozart or FDR?

42

Narile said:

Like myself, Satan, and Fretful, they were North Carolina natives who came from somewhere else. :smiley:

43

How about the person who “discovered” the chlorination of water? (If that person’s name is even known.)

“Clean” water sure cuts down on water-borne diseases.

44

Yes, both Marx and Rachel Carson were on the top 100 list.

The argument that “if Guttenburg hadn’t invented moveable type, someone else would have invented it a few years later” doesn’t hold up, IMHO. The same argument can be applied to almost anyone – if Columbus hadn’t made that voyage, someone else would have a few years later; if Washington hadn’t led the Revolution, someone else would have; etc. We gotta deal with history as she is, not as she might have been.

45

I think it quite silly to try and comprehend the fullness of the effect any person had on our world within the last 250 years. I think we should wait until at least 2251 to make judgment. :wink:

46

  1. I can’t believe I misspelled millennium when I opened the topic.

  2. CKDextHavn said:

She actually said (not exact quote) that “it was mostly white males with a few token women and people of color thrown in.” I found it annoying, too, but she did pay attention and see the few that were on the list.

  1. Does anyone actually believe that it would be possible to come up with a “fair, impartial list?”

I sure don’t.

47

I ask you. What’s so great about conqueror’s? Tamerlane, Osman, Nepolean, Edward I…What did they do to further humanity? As far as I can tell someone gets big bad and dangerous, pushes other people around gets paranoid and falls prey to asassination, disease, lunacy or something unsavory. So what? Voltaire was more important than Nepolean, and I can’t think of any lasting impression the other three had. Ideas and the people that bring them to life are far more important because they outlive their creator.

48

Occam: No lasting impression? I don’t want to be rude here, but the list is of people that had a great impact, not nicest people to have over to dinner.

Osman: Did not conqour all that much, actually, was really more of a frontier warlord, but he founded the Ottoman Empire, which was certainly one of the shaping forces of the second half of this Millenium. The modern mess in the Balkans can be interprested as a direct result of the Ottoman empire; the fact that the Hagia Sophia is a mosque is due to the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman empire was for centureies one of the top 3-4 players in world politics, and to say that it had no impact on the rest of the world is tantemont to saying that the existance of France was trivial.

Tamerlane: Was actually much more of a SOB than Osman ever dreamed of being. It is also is some ways harder to defend him because he definitly destroyed much more than he built–while Osman was interested in forming a LASTING empire, Tamer was more of your “rape and pillage” type. His empire began to desentagrate about five minutes after he died. (In bed, by the way, while on the way to attack China–at the age of seventy)However, even destruction makes a huge impact. Many, many small kingdoms that exisited before Tamer never recovered, and were instead swept up into larger political entities that had been able to take the blow (the Ottomans were one of these groups that survived and expanded into the confussion Tamer left behind). The whole map of the middle east was redrawn, permently. From a Eurocentric point of view, his actions were extremely influential if only because his almost complete distruction of the Ottomans delayed the conquest of Constantanople fifty years, which gave the Greek scholors of Constantanople fifty more years to see the writting on the wall and take thier books and flee to Italy, where they sparked the Italian Rennasiance and all of its reprocussions. From a more worldly perspective, one of Tamer’s decendents (I think a grandson, but I get confused. Tamer was a Warrior’s Warrior and kept having children by various women/girls/sheep until the day he died. The enourmous number of male heirs is part of the reason the empire fell apart), Baber went to India and founded the Moghul empire, which was extemly important in its own right.

I don’t mean to jump down your throat, but history is not a pretty subject, and someone who “gets big bad and dangerous, pushes other people around gets paranoid and falls prey to asassination, disease, lunacy or something unsavory.” often also changes the shape of the world. You may not admire them, but it is nieve to deny their role.

On a side note, I do think the whole list thing is pretty silly. It is hard to see how one desides who affected history “more”. There is also the question of intent. Much of the effects people have are not willed. Tamer certainly didn’t mean to give Constantanople another fifty years–should he get credit? This is why historians rarely, if ever, use the “great man” theroy of History, and stick to the broader forces that contributed to the rise and fall of great men.

49

And a lot of ‘great men’ were simply people who happened to be in the right place at the right time. The Wright Brothers were a good example. The main reason we didn’t have powered flight before 1908 was because engine technology wasn’t ready. For flight to be possible, you need to be able to generate a certain amount of HP/lb, and we just couldn’t do that until that time. The engines finally came available, and the Wright Brothers were there. They made some minor engineering innovations, but nothing really fantastic. And powered flight could have taken place without those innovations (Lilienthal could have flown his glider forever if he had the right engine for it, 30 years earlier. George Cayley designed and flew an airplane with wings, fuselage and tail in 1799, and flew models of it. But he had no engine).

Gates is another example. He was in the right place at the right time. There was a need for a universal operating system for microcomputers, and he was the guy who provided it. If he wasn’t around, there were lots of others ready to step into the void. OS/2, UNIX, GEM, you name it.

50

I hate to break this to you, dhanson, but IBM contracted Microsoft to write OS/2. In fact, many elements of the OS/2 kernel and OS/2 Presentation Manager wound up in Windows.

51

dhanson, I’m not arguing that someone else wouldn’t have made the airplane if the Wrights had not, but what they did were not ‘minor’ engineering innovations. Pretty much every detailed history of flight that I’ve read stated they were the first to understand how and why wing warping works, and therefor were the first to easily steer their plane. As CKDestHavn stated, the claim of right person, right time, can be made of any inventor, but don’t belittle them due to that.

>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<

—The dragon observes

52

I’m not belittling them, but if they hadn’t flown first, there would have been another powered flight by someone else within 5 years. Bleriot’s Monoplane, which flew 4 years after the Wright Brother’s plane, was of a completely different, and much more modern design. The Wright Flyer was a box-kite biplane with a canard and a pusher engine. Bleriot’s plane had a tractor engine, a fuselage and tail, and a single wing. He gained little or no knowledge from the Wright’s design, and was already working on his planes when the Wright Flyer flew.

Wing warping wasn’t necessary for controlled powered flight. Modern powered hangliders do it through body shift. If a wing has dihedral, you don’t even need ailerons or wing warp. Just turn the rudder, and the plane will bank into the turn properly.

Anyway, wing warp wasn’t that great an idea. Ailerons work much better. If you look at gliders built since 1799 you’ll see that the designers knew about cambered airfoils, so it’s a very small step to controlling the lift on one wing by modifying the camber, either through warp, or ailerons, or spoilers.

Anyway, George Cayley may have been more important than the Wrights. Here are some of his contributions to flight:

A) He set down the mathematical principles of flight (i.e. lift, thrust, drag)

B) He was the first to make use of models for flying research, among them a very modern-looking glider which flew well using a single wing, a fuselage, and a tail with a rudder and elevator. He flew it in 1804.

C) He was the first to draw attention to the importance of streamlining

D) He was the first to suggest the benefits of biplanes and triplanes to get increased lift without increasing span

E) He was the first to construct and fly a man-carrying glider, in 1849, 54 years before the Wright Flyer came along.

F) He was the first to demonstrate the means by which a cambered airfoil provides lift.

G) He was the first to suggest the use of an internal combustion engine and propellor to provide thrust.

If the engines had been available, I think Cayley would have flown a powered aircraft in the mid-late 1800’s. Unfortunately, fuel oil didn’t have a low enough flash point to make a serviceable engine, so manned, powered flight had to wait.

BTW, an unmanned airplane achieved powered, sustained flight in 1857, using a steam engine. The problem was that the steam engine was too heavy to provide enough thrust to carry itself and a man.