Big Thinkers



Rosa Parks

Sometimes the simplest of acts can lead to the mightiest of consequences. On December 1st, 1955, forty-two year old Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus after working her shift at the Montgomery Fair Department Store in Alabama and took a seat in the first row of the “coloured section” reserved for non-white passengers in the middle of the bus. When the first ten white only rows reached their capacity, bus driver James Blake moved the “coloured” section sign and demanded those passengers give up their seats. Three of the passengers complied. Ms. Parks refused.

That simple act of defiance had far-reaching consequences. Ms. Parks was charged with disorderly conduct and fined $10.00 and $4.00 in court costs. Her arrest resulted in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that lasted for 382 days. It also served as one of the sparks that launched the Civil Rights Movement that changed the fabric of American society forever. The boycott later served as inspiration for similar actions throughout the world, including South Africa during the nightmare of Apartheid.

When she passed away on October 24th, 2005 Montgomery decorated the front seats of their buses with black ribbons in her memory. She became the first woman, and the second African American, to lie in honour in the Capital Rotunda in Washington D.C. She was buried in Detroit at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the chapel that was soon to carry her name. Her headstone, already prepared by Ms. Parks herself, read simply “Rosa L. Parks, wife, 1913 – 2005”: a humble epitaph for the woman that became the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement and helped change the world.

Terry Fox

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. They let nothing stand in their way. Terry Fox was born in Winnipeg Manitoba on July 28, 1958; and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. As a youth he was actively involved in sports, participating in soccer, rugby, baseball, and his favourite, diving. Even as a child he refused to let disadvantages get in his way. He was determined to play guard for his junior high basketball team despite being only five feet tall and not particularly good at the game. With a never-say-die attitude and a lot of practice, he became one of the best guards on the team by Grade Ten.

On November 12, 1976, the promising young athlete who was about to embark on a career as a physical education teacher slammed his car into a truck and sustained an injured right knee. In 1977, the leg was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of cancer that was likely triggered by the accident. The only treatment was amputation. At the tender age of 18, his bright future was over.

He never succumbed to despair. In fact, he turned tragedy into opportunity and became one of the great modern heroes. On April 12, 1980 Fox dipped his legged into the Atlantic Ocean at St. John’s, Newfoundland and began his cross-Canada “Marathon of Hope” to raise money for cancer research. The world cheered his every step. Sadly, the cancer had spread and he never completed his journey. After 143 days and 5,373 kilometers, he was forced to stop near Thunder Bay in Ontario. He died on June 28, 1981.

Terry fox has been memorialized in books, film and song. He has had a mountain and a park named in his honour and been commemorated on the Canadian dollar coin. Every year the Terry Fox Run is held around the world to raise money for cancer research; and he remains an inspiration to millions. His body may have succumbed to the ravages of cancer, but his idea lives on.

Sun Tzu

The greatest weapon when fighting any war is the human mind. Even after centuries of tactics and technological development, the greatest military strategist of all time remains Sun Tzu.

Little is known about the man himself. His birth name was actually Sūn Wŭ –the title of Sun Tzu, meaning “Master Sun”, was given after he achieved fame. He was a general who lived in the Chinese Kingdom of Wu in the 6th Century BC. Records indicate he was a member of the shi, descendants of Chinese nobles who had lost their lands in territorial disputes. He spent many years as a mercenary during which he wrote The Art of War, his famous treatise detailing the stratagems for military success. Soon after he was hired by King Helü of Wu, and is credited with turning the kingdom from a semi-barbaric territory into one of the most powerful Chinese empires of the time. He vanished into a peaceful retirement and his date of death remains unknown.

More than two thousand years later, Sun Tzu’s ideas continue to influence the world. His theories and philosophies became cornerstones of the martial arts. His techniques are still studied by military strategists today. The Art of War is considered one of the greatest literary staples of all time, and has in recent years been applied to the world of business with great success. Little may be known of the man himself, but his ideas continue to have a big impact.

Thomas Edison

The symbol of a light bulb flashing over somebody’s head has long been synonymous with the birth of a big idea. We have one man to thank for that: Thomas Alva Edison. Not only did he create the light bulb, he is arguably one of the biggest big thinkers of all time, with an astonishing 1,093 patents to his name in the US alone. Credited with saying “Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration,” his mere one percent alone is mind-staggering.

As a child growing up in Port Huron, Michigan in the mid-1800s, he was home schooled by his mother after his teacher claimed his mind was “addled”. His career started humbly as a telegraph operator, and many of his inventions are related to that field. His first patent, granted on June 1 1869, was for an electric voice recorder, but he didn’t gain public attention until 1877 with the creation of his phonograph. He subsequently formed the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878, which lives on today as General Electric. In 1891 he built a kinetoscope that allowed people to watch short films, and continued to move the fledgling movie industry forward, culminating in the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908.

These few examples would be accomplishment for any lifetime, and they barely scratch the surface. It is safe to say that every person living today is touched by at least one of his ideas daily, and he is often credited as being one of the most influential people to ever live. Not bad for the young student who had been casually dismissed as an intellectual dim bulb.

Helen Keller

Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27 1880. She was a healthy baby until an illness at the age of nineteen months left her blind and deaf. Despite the barriers, she initially learned to communicate with the help of Martha Washington, the six year old daughter of the family cook. When Helen herself was six, twenty year old Anne Sullivan, was brought into the family to provide her education. Though the relationship was initially rocky, it became the guiding force that helped Helen learn to read, and talk through a method that involved touching the lips and throats of others as they spoke. Her formal education continued through various institutions and she became the first deaf and blind person to graduate from college in 1904.

She spent her life traveling the world as a lecturer and author; writing a total of twelve books and countless articles on a number of topics. She campaigned for people with disabilities, pacifism, socialism, and worker’s rights. In 1915 she founded Helen Keller International, a non-profit organization for preventing blindness, and spent many of her later years raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. She passed away on June 1, 1968 at the age of 87. She may have lost her sight. She may have lost her hearing. But her vision continues to inspire.

Galileo

Big ideas are not always welcomed with open arms. Often the larger the concept, the greater the resistance; as was discovered by the man who gazed at the heavens and changed the way we see the universe.

Galileo Galilei was born on February 15, 1564 in Pisa, Italy and grew up in relatively privileged circumstances. His formal education encompassed a number of fields including mathematics, physics, philosophy, astronomy and astrology. He excelled in every area.

Though he spent his life making dozens of contributions to science and technology he is most famous for taking the earth out of the centre of the universe and putting it in its proper place. Using his telescopic observations of Jupiter’s moons, he proved that the universe as was then known actually revolved around the sun. Needless to say this did not sit well with the religious authorities, who denounced his findings and accused him of heresy in 1614. Galileo spent the rest of his life defending and finding further proof in support of his theories; but was forced by order of the Inquisition to recant his beliefs and he spent his final years under house arrest. He died on January 8, 1642. Though scorned at the time, he is now hailed as one of the founding fathers of the scientific revolution and his methods are still used to expand our knowledge of the universe and debate our place in it.

Orville and Wilbur Wright

Big thinkers are frequently accused of having their heads in the clouds. It is meant only in a symbolic sense, but the Wright Brothers were among the first who actually did.

At the start of the 20th Century people still had their feet planted firmly on the ground, but were itching to fly the friendly skies. The race was on, with inventors around the world moving heaven and earth to be the first to conquer air travel. They scrambled to build experimental gliders and airplanes with varying levels of success. Finally, on December 17 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to boldly go where no-one had gone before.

Orville made the first flight, traveling 120 feet in 12 seconds. Wilbur completed the second attempt at 175 feet; before Orville took the controls again to journey 200 feet more. The fourth and final flight of the day saw Wilbur manning the cockpit again, covering 852 feet in 59 seconds.

Technically, it was not the first manned flight; but it had the distinction of being the first airplane that allowed the pilot to steer and maintain the craft’s equilibrium through the “three-axis control” mechanism the brothers had invented. That control was the necessary component needed to make commercial flight a practical endeavour. The Wright brothers continued to guide the aviation industry to even greater heights throughout their careers. They dared to kiss the sky, and in so doing revolutionized transportation forever.

Socrates

The greatest thinker of all time was not a scientist, strategist, or scribe. In fact, his exact occupation is unknown. He was simply a man who, many at the time would argue, liked the sound of his own voice. He turned dialogue into an art form, and left his growing number of followers hanging on his every word. In so doing, he laid the foundations for Western philosophy. His method of inquiry –asking a series of questions to help a person or group examine the validity of their beliefs, knowledge, and morality by eliminating contradictory hypotheses– shaped the very way we think. He also made a lot of people very angry.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was born in the latter part of the fifth Century BC. He lived during a critical time in history when Athens was licking its wounds after a crushing defeat by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War; and the public was questioning the soundness of democracy. His lectures on the pursuit of knowledge, virtue, and morality challenged the Athenian establishment, and garnered a large following. He further exacerbated the situation by making many people look foolish with his line of questioning.

He was charged with heresy and corrupting the Athenian youth. Despite being given many opportunities to basically put a sock in it, Socrates was eventually found guilty and sentenced to death by ingesting hemlock. It was too late. The ‘corruption’ had set in and Socrates’ ideas lived on through his followers; notably Plato and later, Aristotle. The man was silenced, but his thoughts still echo today.

Leonardo da Vinci

On April 15, 1452, a peasant woman in a small Italian hamlet gave birth to the illegitimate son of a local notary. As was often the case at the time, the newborn was not even given a proper surname, but was simply named for the local town. At the age of five the child was taken from his mother to be raised by his father, uncle and grandparents. His father soon took a sixteen-year-old bride, who treated the child as if he were her own. Sadly, the bond was soon broken as she died at a very young age. Such a maudlin childhood did not bode well for his future, likely condemning him to a lifetime of hardship and misery.

But that child was Leonardo da Vinci, and he possessed one of the most powerful minds in all history.

The list of da Vinci’s contributions to the fields of art and science would fill volumes. In fact they already have, and many of his diaries have survived as a testament to his genius. He truly was ahead of his time and created plans for a helicopter, tank, calculator and solar power centuries before the technology was able to make his ideas feasible. His scientific activities produced tremendous advances in an array of fields including mathematics, astronomy, anatomy and engineering. His works of art still touch our souls today, notably through his paintings of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper.

On May 2, 1519 da Vinci passed away in France where he had spent the last years of his life in the service of his close friend, King François the First. The illegitimate child had come a long way from his meager beginnings, proving that great minds know no limitations.

Buckminster Fuller

Even as a child Buckminster Fuller showed a flair for design and invention, often creating things from materials he had found while walking through the woods near his home. His early years were not particularly charmed; by his own admission he was a misfit. He studied at Harvard, but was expelled twice due to irresponsible behaviour and lack of interest. An early attempt to start a business with his father-in-law ended in failure. In 1927, at the age of 32, Fuller was unemployed, bankrupt, and had just lost his daughter to complications from polio and spinal meningitis. He struggled with alcohol and pondered suicide, but ultimately did not succumb to despair.

Instead, Fuller went to work for Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he created his most famous invention in 1949: the self-supporting geodesic dome building. It was designed as a tetrahedron and constructed from aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin. The US government immediately saw the military applications and contracted Fuller to build them for the army. Fuller’s domes have dotted landscapes around the world and even played a role in IMAX history. Not only was a dome featured at Montreal’s World Expo in 1967, the giant Cinesphere constructed at Ontario Place in Toronto became home to the first Imax theatre in 1971.

Fuller was awarded a total of 28 US patents during his life, and received many honorary doctorates, including one from Bates College at Harvard. He also wrote more than thirty books and delivered lectures relating to his personal crusade to finding out what the individual can do to improve humanity that governments and organizations can’t. Basically he wanted to prove his theory that one person can make a difference. Ironically, he need only have looked in the mirror for his answer.

Guglielmo Marconi

“Never say never,” is a common theme that links many of history’s greatest minds, and is best epitomized by Guglielmo Marconi who silenced a cacophony of nay-sayers by revolutionizing the world of communications.

He first started conducting experiments using equipment he often built himself in the attic of his home in Pontecchio, Italy. His aim was to find a way of using radio waves to create a system of wireless communications technology that would not rely on the fragile cables required for the electric telegraph. Countless others had strived to create such a system for over half a century with limited success, and the growing consensus argued that it was impossible. In the summer of 1895, Marconi moved his experiments outside, and positioned the transmitting and receiving antennas so they touched the ground, using the earth to act as a waveguide resonator. By so doing, he was able to transmit a signal for a distance of 1.5 kilometers. At the ripe old age of 21, Marconi had proven the skeptics wrong.

In 1896, he left his native home in Italy to continue his research in London, England with the assistance of William Preece, the Chief Electrical Engineer of the British Post Office. He continued to increase the distance the signal could travel until finally, on December 12, 1901, Marconi became the first person to transmit a signal across the Atlantic Ocean from Cornwall, England to St. John’s, Newfoundland. This feat has been hailed as one of the greatest scientific advances of all time, and arguably established Marconi as the world’s first electronics geek.