History's Greatest Unsung

Great Debates
1

Shaping this as a GD could be viewed as something of a construct but in the hope of attracting more interesting responses that “My pet rabbit” “My English teacher” et al, I’ve phrases this contentiously i.e. is my guy bigger than your guy ?

Anyway, unsung hero’s: The people that did all the leg work only for someone to come along at the last minute and take the credit for posterity, the name every school kid doesn’t know (but should), the real hero in an heroic story. Could be any area: Science, Politics (maybe), the Humanities, Art, Sport even. Could be a discoverer, an inventor, academic, theorist,……anyone.

My choice: I almost went with Sir Richard Burton (less unsung, I suspect) but as one of the primary reasons I like the unsung hero’s of history is that they give the more famed a broader context my nomination is, I think, an even stronger candidate. Please let me introduce to (or remind you of) the wonderful Erasmus Darwin

Dear old Erasmus almost pulled the whole thing together. With a few more years he might just have been the most famous of all the Victorian’s (he died two years before the steam engine hit the railways and was thus denied access to the soon to be burgeoning local fossil record that railway engineering, literally, unearthed as it cut and tunnelled its way across the country). As fate would have it, his grandson, one Charlie Darwin, was left to author an intriguing little book some 60 years after Erasmus died.

Erasmus was interested in far more than Evolution and the origin of species. He was an influential poet and writer, a philosopher, technologist and he fathered 14 children through two marriages. A friend of Franklin and of the cause of American revolutionary’s, a leader of the Lunar Society and a great physician. A bit of an all rounder was Erasmus, his influences spread across many disciplines for generations and laid the groundwork for many other more noted Victorians.

Example Ref: http://www.litreview.com/reviews/1999/07/Porter_on_King-Hele.html
Example Ref for Sir Richard Burton: http://www.isidore-of-seville.com/burton/
Is he history’s greatest unsung hero ?

2

Never heard of him.

Sorry…

3

Great idea for a thread, only I can’t come up with any examples.

Your candidate has merit, though. I’ll look up the name when I get home (posting from the job) - but the guy who built the first sea-going chronometre could perhaps be a candidate as well ?

Spent (literally) decades constructing a clock that would withstand the rigours of sea travel but was denied the reward offered for such a clock because the committee was more interested in astronomical methods. I’ll post some facts when I get home and can check the book.

Anyway, all of a sudden, exact navigation was possible and Britain had a serious strategic edge for a while.

S. Norman

4

Well, I have two from the film world. Alice Guy Blaché was not only the first female director, but one of the very first directors anywhere. In fact, she invented the concept of “film director.” She had a 20-year career, but is pretty much forgotten, though recently she’s had a bit of a media comeback. Here’s a link:

http://www.reelwomen.com/blachebio.html

And Max Linder, a film comic who—in my opinion!—runs circles around that cockney upstart Cholly Cheplin. I have a video compilation of Max’s remaining films, and he’s not only hilarious, but adorable; kind of a pocket Errol Flynn. Link:

http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/FeaturedStar/perfor86.htm

5

Rosalind Franklin. She did all the X-ray crystallography that made the discovery of the structure of DNA possible, yet she wasn’t included in the Nobel Prize. If you read Watson’s book, “The Double Helix”, it is clear that Franklin did the lion’s share of the work while Watson and Crick simply played around.

6

My candidate is, as you might expect, a religious guy. But let me tell you his story.

We don’t know a whole lot about his family and childhood. As a young teen in the late First Century AD, he started hanging out with a gang that would mug travelers. He was out doing this one day, and attacked this old geezer who surprised him by offering him, in addition to the money he’d found in the old guy’s baggage, some that he had had hidden away. Then the old dude said some insightful stuff to the kid that turned him around, took him home, taught him philosophy and mysticism, and the brand-new Christian belief system, which he had learned first-hand from Jesus himself.

The kid spent the rest of his teens with the old guy, was there when he died, and spent the rest of his life teaching what the old guy had taught him. His message was one of God’s love and man’s responsibility to love one another. He wrote some polemic pieces cutting down elaborate Gnostic philosophical constructs and silly materialistic ideas, eventually became a Bishop, and lived to about age 100. During one of the Christian persecutions, he was arrested and called on to renounce his faith, being at that point a minor celebrity in the area and would be released if he did so – apparently the idea being to turn others against Christianity by the force of his example, as so many had been turned on to it by the same thing. He refused and was martyred – a sort of Rasputin-type killing, as he didn’t die the first time (burned at the stake, IIRC), and they had to try something else to finally kill him.

Probably the only two things I’m really proud of in this world are the fact that I played the old-geezer role to a teen gangster some years ago, quite successfully, and that I’ve gained some small portion of the sort of respect he got, among the Doper community, by some of my posts here.

The old geezer was St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. And the young guy? Where do you think I got my nick from?

7

Not totally unsung, but Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. He did a lot for England and one of the reasons the monarchy is still around today is his influence.

Same with Frederick III of Germany, who died after only 88 days of ruling. His son started WWI. Fritz was probably one of the greatest assets Imperial Germany ever had. Yet NO ONE remembers him.

8

And Guinastasia, if you have Prince Albert in a can, please let him out. :wink:

My nominee for greatest unsung hero is Nicholas LeBlanc. In 1791, he came up with a way to make lye inexpensively using ordinary salt. With the invention of inexpensive lye came the ability to make inexpensive soap. Without LeBlanc’s discovery, soap would be a rare luxury item, and not the ubiquitous tool of cleanliness and disinfection that it is today. And the infant mortality rate would probably be higher as a result.

9

Never heard of him? Hardly surpising.

This guy worked for the British East India Company in the 1600s. For reasons too complicated to go into, he defended the island of Run in the East Indies for three years against Dutch competitors. Eventually, the Dutch became so fed up with this guy, that they swapped this tiny island in the middle of nowhere, for another colony that no one cared about - New Amsterdam.

Of course New Amsterdam became New York, and the rest is, well, history.

I also second Rosalind Franklin. Not only was she a complete genius (and IIRC one of only three female science undergraduates at Oxford at the time), but I’ve also had sex in her room in Somerville college.