When people ask who has done the most to shape our world, we often think of those who have contributed the greatest technological advances. Certainly, the visionaries who launched the four Industrial Revolutions played a major role in reshaping our world. Beginning with the early steam-driven machines created by James Watt and Robert Fulton, to the electronic devices and fuel driven machines of the Wright brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla our world began to change as technology brought new advances in transportation, communication and manufacturing.
These first two Industrial Revolutions were followed by the so-called Third Industrial Revolution characterized by the growth of digital technology and computers initiated by geniuses like John Mauchley, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. Today, we are in an era that some are calling a Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which advances in communications, quantum computing and artificial intelligence are integrating companies in different fields, promoting a kind of cross-pollination of ideas and processes. This phase continues to unfold through the work of entrepreneurial visionaries like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sam Altman (ChatGPT).
Pioneers in medicine like Alexander Fleming (penicillin), Banting & Best (insulin), Edward Jenner (smallpox vaccine) and Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) prevented millions of deaths from various diseases and afflictions, reducing significantly mortality rates and extending lifespans.
While these geniuses have changed dramatically how we live, geniuses like Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Neils Bohr have changed how we perceive time, space, gravity and the beginnings of our universe. Great authors, playwrights, composers of music and artists as well as philosophers enhance our quality of life and our knowledge of the human condition.
In the overwhelming glitter of all these life-changing accomplishments, we often overlook the changes in personal freedom that have come from visionaries who fought against the feudal system, monarchic oppression, slavery and other forms of human subjugation. The philosophers, politicians, and orators who at great personal risk, challenged oppressive regimes are visionaries who have delivered so much to enable so many to live in a freedom rarely enjoyed in previous centuries.
In the year 2000, Albert Einstein, widely celebrated as the quintessential genius, was selected by Time Magazine, not as the person of the year, but as the person of the century! Among others being considered for having “the greatest impact on this century, for better or worse,” were Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. These people displayed different arrays of intellectual attributes, yet the selection committee of journalists picked Einstein. Choosing a “greatest impact” created a lot of controversy, because comparing the influence of people in different fields requires a judgment about the relative importance of each domain. Journalist Charles Krauthammer suggested that Winston Churchill, rather than Einstein, deserved the accolade, asserting, “If Einstein hadn’t lived, the ideas he produced might have been delayed. But take away Churchill’s stand in 1940, and fascism might well have triumphed.”
Similarly, comparing the intelligence of those who display different faces of cognition is fraught with the same judgment difficulties as choosing which of several people in vastly different pursuits have made the biggest impact. Across all fields of endeavour, it’s the visionaries and the geniuses who have contributed the most to the quality of life that you and I enjoy today.
