# Who is the most influential person of all time? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 21, 2014, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364 "2014-01-21T13:59:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![weemart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f14d63/32.png) [@weemart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/weemart)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2014, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/21 "2014-01-21T22:52:35Z")
But since we can’t put a name to ppl that early does it not leave us back at square 1 so the most influential ppl are the ones who affect us now that we can put a name to… Which would mean the TV and phone inventors… John Logie Baird and Alexander Graham Bell. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2014, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/22 "2014-01-21T23:24:20Z")
Yes, but you can’t name an influential technology, and then pick a person’s name out of a hat and ascribe the invention of that technology to that person. Yes, Bell worked a lot on the telephone. But if Bell had been hit by a bus, Elisha Gray would have gotten the patent for the telephone literally on the same day. Darwin only published his book on natural selection which he had been working on for 20 years when Wallace wrote to him about this interesting new theory Wallace had though of, and what did Darwin think of it? Newton and Leibniz famously feuded for decades over who should be credited as the inventor of calculus. However, Newton’s other contributions like his theories of mechanics really were totally advanced and way beyond what anyone else of his time were working on. So Newton does belong on the list. Crediting Bell as the sole inventor of the telephone is like crediting Steve Jobs as the inventor of the home computer. ---
**Author:** ![BrokenBriton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@BrokenBriton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrokenBriton)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2014, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/23 "2014-01-21T23:27:26Z")
I was going to say Genghis Khan for rearranging half the planets DNA but he doesn’t get a mention. It’s yet another very Anglo-Saxon list. ---
**Author:** ![weemart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f14d63/32.png) [@weemart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/weemart)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2014, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/24 "2014-01-21T23:39:54Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Yes, Bell worked a lot on the telephone. But if Bell had been hit by a bus, Elisha Gray would have gotten the patent for the telephone literally on the same day. > > Crediting Bell as the sole inventor of the telephone is like crediting Steve Jobs as the inventor of the home computer. Bell didn’t get hit by a bus and therefore receives the credit. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/25 "2014-01-22T00:05:01Z")
> [@weemart](#): > > Bell didn’t get hit by a bus and therefore receives the credit. Why? Bell didn’t invent “the telephone”, he invented _a_ telephone. Other people were working on the exact same problem at the exact same time and we would have had telephones exactly the same as we have now if Bell had never existed. > **[Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray_and_Alexander_Bell_telephone_controversy)** > > The Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell controversy concerns the question of whether Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone independently. This issue is narrower than the question of who deserves credit for inventing the telephone, for which there are several claimants. > At issue are roles of each inventor's lawyers, the filing of patent documents, and allegations of theft. > Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at Boston University and tutor of deaf children.... In my mind “influential” means “if this person had never existed the world would be a different place”. Bell and lots of other inventors and scientists were not highly influential by this definition. Sure, they made contributions but so did all sorts of other people. Picking a name out of a hat and deciding to call a particular person “the inventor of X” is just silly. ---
**Author:** ![weemart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f14d63/32.png) [@weemart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/weemart)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/26 "2014-01-22T00:16:41Z")
Bell’s the person who got credited with being the 1st person to invent a practical telephone. > **[Alexander Graham Bell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell)** > > Alexander Graham Bell (/ˈɡreɪ.əm/, born Alexander Bell; March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born\[N 1\] inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885. > Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf; profoundly influencing Bell's life's work. His research on hearing a... To state if Bell got hit by a bus then someone else would have got it is just silliness. I dropped out of university after 2 years studying chemstry. I’m not going to even attempt to say if I had stayed in university I might have made chemical discoveries that other ppl have discovered between then and now. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/27 "2014-01-22T02:17:49Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > It doesn’t matter if he was real or completely a confabulation of Paul 200 years later - there is no valid way to discount Jesus as the most significant figure in history. I am utterly unreligious, but trying to imagine a world without 2000 years of shaping by Christianity leads directly to science fiction. I agree with most of your thoughts there in respect to the significance of Jesus and the almost immeasurable influence of Christianity on world history, except that as already already noted Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, but indeed the Gospels were written much later. And yes, it does matter if a person on the list is real or mythological, but there seems to be little doubt among theological scholars that the historical Jesus was a real person. While the evidence is entirely circumstantial, there’s a lot of it, and and it seems to point to the historical Jesus having been primarily a political revolutionary. Like many of his contemporaries during a turbulent political time, he sought liberation from the Romans, and the historical evidence is that he was crucified as a _lestai_, a Greek word from the Gospels which translates today as “bandit” but was actually the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist rebel, one who threatened the social and economic order. The canonical gospels were written after the fact, not as historical accounts, but as articles of faith seeking to deify Jesus. Nevertheless, he became the nucleus around which, for better or worse, one of the greatest influences in civilization coalesced. > [@weemart](#): > > Bell’s the person who got credited with being the 1st person to invent a practical telephone. > > To state if Bell got hit by a bus then someone else would have got it is just silliness. Not silly at all, IMHO. Bell just happened to be the first at the patent office with a natural consequence of evolving technology that others had also been working on. I would think that a person’s standing among the most influential of all time should be based on a uniquely singular role that isn’t completely interchangeable with just about anybody else who might have been at just the right place at the right time. I’d have to go along, though, with the general consensus that the list is crap, simply because the criteria are so nebulous and the ordering is completely pointless. I’d probably pick about ten names with no attempt to prioritize and leave it at that. ---
**Author:** ![weemart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f14d63/32.png) [@weemart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/weemart)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/28 "2014-01-22T03:00:36Z")
To write off Bell just because some1 else was going to do it around the same time is not a fair system. No1 writes off Microsoft despite the fact Windows is basically a copy of the old Commodore Amiga Workshop. PCs and Windows survived. The Amiga and Workshop didn’t. There were other similar operating systems at the time which didn’t survive. The fact is Microsoft and Windows were the ones who made the money and became famous. Bell’s the one who got the patent and therefore became more famous than the other ppl. Was the argument not the fact that without tv and telephone a lot of these other ppl wouldn’t be known to most of us, therefore the list in itself isn’t very accurate. It doesn’t matter who u want to credit with the discoveries but the exclusion of ppl who’s inventions have had a very high impact on modern society. Since modern society is evolved from previous societies and we can only live in modern times the list isn’t very accurate. Remember all the previous societies were once modern and the ppl of those times lived in their modern times. ---
**Author:** ![BrightNShiny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@BrightNShiny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrightNShiny)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/29 "2014-01-22T03:09:19Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > Apparently this isn’t a list of “most influential” but of “most cited as being influential.” Or something like that… I’m curious as to whether they only looked at English works, or Romance Language works or works in all languages. I also wonder whether different geographical areas or different languages have substantially different scanning rates. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/30 "2014-01-22T04:05:45Z")
> [@weemart](#): > > No1 writes off Microsoft despite the fact Windows is basically a copy of the old Commodore Amiga Workshop. PCs and Windows survived. The Amiga and Workshop didn’t. There were other similar operating systems at the time which didn’t survive. The fact is Microsoft and Windows were the ones who made the money and became famous. Sorry, but I must once again vehemently disagree. Microsoft and Apple both ripped off the Windows paradigm from Xerox PARC, but the fact was that it would have occurred anyway because the nascent technology was there and the need for the paradigm was obvious; I remember someone giving a talk around that pre-Windows time about how ridiculous it would be if all your office paperwork on your desk consisted of nothing more than scrolling lines of text! 😃 Microsoft and Windows made money because of Bill Gates’ uniquely strong (and not often very ethical) skills at leveraging the technology into monopolistic business practices that created a _de facto_ standard, and resulted in a radically different PC world than we would have otherwise had (for better or worse). Few, if any, other people could have done that. Ditto for Steve Jobs, who had a truly unique Zen-like vision that fused elegant design with elegant functionality. With Steve Jobs’ demise, Apple is now going God only knows where, and though Bill is nominally still around, his business model no longer works. ---
**Author:** ![weemart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f14d63/32.png) [@weemart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/weemart)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/31 "2014-01-22T04:12:41Z")
It doesn’t matter what happens in the future. Windows will always be remembered as the 1st standard operating system. Even now other operating systems which have emerged are still referred to as “windows-style”. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/32 "2014-01-22T04:49:57Z")
Yes. And what the hell does that have to do with anything I said? ---
**Author:** ![Steely\_Dan\_Fan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de053/32.png) [@Steely\_Dan\_Fan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steely_Dan_Fan)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/33 "2014-01-22T04:50:49Z")
Richard Sherman. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/34 "2014-01-22T05:03:39Z")
Allen Sherman ---
**Author:** ![the\_diego](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@the\_diego](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_diego)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/35 "2014-01-22T06:04:18Z")
Looks like he took the main characters in a grade 3 history book, and filled out the rest with US presidents and men of science and the arts. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/36 "2014-01-22T07:10:27Z")
King Arthur? If we’re going to include clearly fictional people, how about Robin Hood and Batman? ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/37 "2014-01-22T07:19:16Z")
Allen Dulles, probably in ways we’ll never know, shaped a lot of our modern world. He’s by far not the most influential of all time, but as far as being an underrated influence, he’s probably at the top of that list. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/38 "2014-01-22T14:25:11Z")
> [@BrightNShiny](#): > > I’m curious as to whether they only looked at English works, or Romance Language works or works in all languages. I also wonder whether different geographical areas or different languages have substantially different scanning rates. Well, they admit that the English Wikipedia was one of their sources (and then blasted it for under-representing women, as if that issue is _Wiki’s_ fault!) They then compared their list to a bunch of other lists, polls, and such, made whatever adjustments they thought necessary, and then published it: > [@](#): > > We have validated our results by comparing them against several standards: published rankings by historians, public polls, even in predicting the prices of autographs, paintings, and baseball cards. Since we analyzed the English Wikipedia, we admittedly measured the interests and judgments of primarily the Western, English-speaking community. Our algorithms also don’t include many women at the very top: Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) [at number 13] is the top ranked woman in history according to our analysis. **This is at least partially due to women being underrepresented in Wikipedia.** That is possibly one of the more ungrateful things I’ve read in a major publication: “Here’s my article. If you disagree with it, it’s my source’s fault, not mine.” :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/39 "2014-01-22T14:31:36Z")
Let’s not turn this into a Gates/Microsoft/Job/Apple discussion please. Neither of them belong on this list as long as Bardeen, Schockley, and Brittain are not on it. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2014, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364/40 "2014-01-22T14:49:59Z")
> [@](#): > > …you have to keep in mind that most of our history WAS made by white guys, most of whom are dead. Who’s “our”, paleface? :dubious: There are no Africans (unless you count Gandhi), no Chinese people and two Indians. No Pingala. No Aryabhata. No Confucius. No Mao. No Nehru. No Shaka. No Imhotep. > [@weemart](#): > > It doesn’t matter what happens in the future. Windows will always be remembered as the 1st standard operating system. Even now other operating systems which have emerged are still referred to as “windows-style”. “Always be remembered” as such by people who aren’t old enough to remember DOS, maybe. It was the first GUI to dominate the market, which is something completely different. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-all-time/679364.md?page=3)