People citing Jesus seem pretty provincial to me - 2/3 of living people don’t accept Jesus.
Fire wasn’t “invented”.
On modern life - that’s ‘modern’ - life, I’d probably have a stab at Henry Ford - if it is indeed correct he came up with the 8 hour a day, 5 days a week concept.
Cecil Adams.
Willis Carrier.
Jesus influenced and influences even those who do not believe in Him. http://www.johnreilly.info/ijhnbb.htm
I could have sworn the first to come up with that was the First International in 1866.
Turns out it goes back even earlier than that: "In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organized a general strike, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals. Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.
In 1864, the eight-hour day quickly became a central demand of the Chicago labor movement. The Illinois legislature passed a law in early 1867 granting an eight-hour day but had so many loopholes that it was largely ineffective. A city-wide strike that began on May 1, 1867 shut down the city’s economy for a week before collapsing. On June 25, 1868, Congress passed an eight-hour law for federal employees which was also of limited effectiveness. (On May 19, 1869, Grant signed a National Eight Hour Law Proclamation.)
In August 1866, the National Labor Union at Baltimore passed a resolution that said, ‘The first and great necessity of the present to free labour of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is achieved.’"
All of which, I’m guessing, is how the First International took up the idea and promoted it.
Johanna - Nice post, thanks for the information.
You don’t say if you agree, though!
Well, how else would he “explain” divine aspect of the verse.
Can you really link WWI and WWII to Jesus? Or, I don’t know, whole notion of usury (interest)? I don’t see any influence there…
c’mon! Both were essentially about the tectonic plates of empire shifting around.
Well, it was organised labour rather than any one person that’s given us many of the comforts we have today. If there were no social systems in place to perpetuate and distribute the technology or politics espoused by individuals mentioned in the thread, they wouldn’t have meant a damn thing to any of us.
+1
The force of organized labor for social and economic change, collectively, means far more to the world than any of your men on horseback.
Bloody socialists!
Wiki has an interesting angle on the history:
And it looks like even more don’t accept Aristotle.
Not relevant, though. You don’t have to “accept” someone to live in a world influenced by him.
Michael Hart’s book spends a few pages reviewing his criteria. People of unknown name (“inventor of fire”) are not allowed. (In any event most early discoveries did not have a single inventor. Bronze, for example, was a gradual development with early advances in S.E. Asia and Cornwall as well as Serbia and Anatolia.)
Hart makes this same point in placing Columbus at #9. I wonder though – why didn’t France or England compete more strongly for the New World if they had the power to do so?
BTW, I don’t know how long the New World would have waited undiscovered without Columbus, but didn’t its discovery excite the imagiation and accelerate the Renaissance?
As I mentioned above, that Newton’s Gravitation was questioned for 70 years argues against this.
Another scientist whose importance may have been immense was Copernicus. That the Earth orbits had been staring astronomers in the face for almost two millenia, yet very few dared to say it.
(But perhaps Copernicus’ discovery was another result of excitement due to Gutenberg and Columbus, and was “an idea whose time had come”?)
One could say the same thing about Newton’s mother. Or blame it all on the butterfly that flipped its wings a million years ago. Unproductive path.
Here again are Hart’s Top Twenty in order. To me, the two most obvious who do not belong are Euclid (several greater mathematicians of that era, Euclid being a compiler) and Moses (prob. mostly fictional).
Muhammed
Isaac Newton
Jesus
Buddha
Confucius
St. Paul
Ts’ai Lun
Johann Gutenberg
Christopher Columbus
Albert Einstein
Louis Pasteur
Galileo
Aristotle
Euclid
Moses
Charles Darwin
Shih Huang Ti
Augustus Caesar
Nicolaus Copernicus
Antoine Lavoisier
Everyone knows that Darwin discovered the theory of Natural Selection. But fewer people know that he only published his work because he got, in the mail, a letter from Alfred Wallace outlining the new theory Wallace had just come up with, and did Darwin think it was worth publishing?
Lots of major scientific and technological advances are discovered independently by different people at the same time. Or, they are discovered but never publicized and are only credited later as the inventor decades later when someone else independently discovers the same thing and doing some research runs across some old papers outlining the exact same thing. The canonical example is Mendel, whose work on genetics was totally ignored until decades later when it was rediscovered. So even though Mendel’s work was highly original, it didn’t actually matter until later when people realized their original work had been anticipated much earlier.
Fred Flintstone
Wasn’t the 8 hour day the rule of King Alfred the Great?
But we are talking about influential.
A better question would be if John the Baptist should be placed ahead of Jesus on the ‘influence path’. Jesus was heavily influenced by John. Without the John movement no Jesus movement.
So, how original was John? Who was he influenced by?
I gather there were several apocalyptic/repentence movements at that time.
I agree with those who put the influence of single individuals through war and conquest to be more dramatic than the progress of technology.
I agree with Muhammed having a huge impact.
Let’s also not forget Temudjin of the Mongols, who knows what the world would be like if the wealthy, advanced regions of transoxania and other Eastern cities hadn’t been massacred and destroyed. Would someone else have united the Mongols?
Not according to the Internet - are you a time traveller?
The spirit of the question is not how you are answering.
The spirit of the OP’s question is, I think, if you reran history without that single person in it…which person’s rerun would come out with a present time the most different from the original history?
If Uggh hadn’t invented fire, OOOgghh would have a little later so Uggh had little effect on history.
On the other hand, what Mendel did could have been done by any farmer at all, all the way back to the dawn of agriculture… And yet, it wasn’t. That, to me, seems to suggest that Mendel did make a major breakthrough.