My candidate: The girl who invented the wheel.
[I don’t know her name, nor do I know whether it was a woman, but I like to think it was]
I think it was probably some fat dude who fell down a hillside and had an epiphany.
Hahahahahaha 
Aww. Now you spoiled it for me.
Complicated question. If you go back far enough then the actions of tons of people played a role in the modern western world.
I can’t name a single person but the scientific renaissance gets my vote as the most important era of human history. Anyone associated with that should get a vote.
Maybe Hitler as well as the most important person as far as changing events. Hitler did alot of things:
Ended the depression
Made the world start to take human rights and international policy seriously
Made Europe start to respect human rights. The western european countries Hitler ran ramsack over are now the most respectul towards human rights of any country on the planet. Had the Eastern European countries not been enslaved by the USSR many would probably have had the same human rights records as much of Europe.
Created a situation where the world didn’t want total war, which may be why the cold war never ended in actual war.
Made the world realize that leaving nutjobs in charge of militaries wasn’t ‘not our problem’ and that isolationism didn’t work.
Made the USSR alot more powerful than it would’ve been otherwise.
FTR many people in the 20th century have fought for human rights and not established dictatorships when they ran the government out of power.
In the process of finishing the book The First American, I concede. Franklin gets my vote for the person without whom the current world would look the most different.
(Yes, the thread is a little old. I read slow.)
I will throw in, out of left field, Charles Martel, who’s generalship at the Battle of Tours effectively kept the Muslim expansion into Europe isolated to the Spanish peninsula.
The Chinese emperor who suddenly and abruptly decided that having a big navy and sailing around spreading Chinese influence was NOT a good idea, and cancelled that entire movement. This was at a point in time when Chinese civilization was quite advanced, comparable to if not ahead of Europe.
I think Louis Pasteur deserves a mention. His work in confirming the germ theory of disease, immunization, pasteurization and all the attendant ramifications from recognizing the role that microorganisms play in disease revolutionalized medicine, saved millions of lives and greatly reduced infant and child mortality rates in the developed world.
Another vote for George Washington.
Important as Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic work in Paris was (not to mention BF’s scientific achievements), if Washington had not sustained the Continental Army in the field through eight hard years of war, often by sheer force of will, and won battles at crucial points (Boston, Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown), all of Franklin’s work would have been for naught. As noted above, Washington emphatically rejected a crown that many would gladly have given him. He then lent his prestige to the Constitutional Convention when he could just have easily remained at Mount Vernon, and then agreed to serve two terms as President, virtually inventing the job and letting the infant republic find its footing. He single-handedly changed the course of human history and helped established a durable, extraordinarily influential democracy. He was, as his biographer Flexner wrote, “the indispensable man.”
Soon after the Revolution, George III was talking to the painter Benjamin West, who knew both the King and Washington. The King asked West what Washington would do now that the war was over. West said he supposed that Washington would resign and go back to his farm. The King (who had every reason to despise Washington) exclaimed, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
And he was right.
Rest easy, the inventor of the wheel was a cavewomen named “Wheel” cite and artist conception here
My nomination -
One man has contributed more to genuine human happiness than all the religious teachers in history…
Walter Elias Disney
Yeah, yeah - credit to Arthur C. Clarke, 2010.
Tossing in a vote for Beethoven.
Sure, those other guys might have created civilization and all that stuff, but they still didn’t really change the fundamental suckiness of life. However, that boy Ludwig’s piano sonatas at least make the suckiness bearable, and gives you hope that somewhere in the cosmos, in whatever place where they came from, things might not suck.
If Beethoven should get disqualified for some reason, for using steroids or something, I might consider giving my vote to Einstein. Or Charles Chaplin.
Or Will Wright.
What, no vote for
You would have to give that credit, really, to Gavrilo Princip.
It’s been forgotten to some extent in the smoke and fire of World War II, but it was World War ONE that really changed the path of modern society, that took away Western civilization’s optimism and forged the path for fascism and communism, that began the concept of true total war, and that sowed the seeds of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and any number of other nasty colonial wars.
Cecil Adams.
Next question?
I hang my head in shame
Huh, well that statement’s quite a surprise to me sitting here in Canada. Democracy? Check. Revolution. Nope.
Carrying on with a small tour around the Commonwealth…
Then there’s Australia. Democracy? Check. Revolution? Nope.
Then there’s New Zealand. Democracy? Check. Revolution? Nope.
I’m sure you can see where this is going…
Aristotle.
Or maybe his mother.
Since Jesus and Mohammed have been mentioned, I’ll nominate Euclid. For all of the flaws of The Elements, (which start at proposition 1!) the idea that given a small number of givens, remarkable results must follow was basically the start of mathematics. Before him, there had been math, and even some “proofs” of things, but Euclid was the first to really introduce rigor. And from that, we get all of modern mathematics. Maybe it’s just the computer scientist in me, but I can think of no development more important in history. It created tools for future scientists to use that they knew were true, which allowed them to focus on their science. YMMV.
The only other person I can think of (off the top of my head) who could be said to have declined absolute power is T.E. Lawrence, AKA Lawrence of Arabia.
Even though he was never offered the job of Supreme Ruler Of The Middle East (or even something like “Governor-General Of Palestine and The Arabian Peninsular”), his political clout post-war was such that he would only have had to have a discreet word in Sir Winston Churchill’s ear at the Officer’s Club and it would be Governor-General Sir T.E. Lawrence drinking tea in Cairo and generally amusing himself with the locals (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).
But, having helped the Arabs overthrow the Turks and begin the road to establishing Arabia as an independent Nation, what did Lawrence do? He enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps (and later, the Royal Air Force) under an assumed name in a desperate attempt to acheive anonymity.
He refused to be made a Knight Commander, did his best to avoid publicity, and generally went out of his way to be as anonymous as possible. The potential was there for Lawrence to become the Emir of Arabia, and instead he chose to become a nobody.
Indeed, if it weren’t for David Lean’s film, almost no-one outside Military History circles would have any idea who he was- and Lawrence himself would probably have preferred it that way.
Even putting that to one side, the Middle East as we know it exists largely because of Lawrence’s efforts- without him, there would have been no British mandate in Palestine to turn into Israel, the Ottomans may still be controlling parts of the Hejaz (unlikely), and who knows what the Middle East would be like today?
Lawrence is a strong candidate for one of the Most Important People In World History, IMO- and his story is fascinating even if you’re not a military historian.