Having left this thread to attract further comment, I find that I have not attempted a revision for some months. With the New Year (2002) almost upon us, I thought I would try again to clean up the list, according to my lights, and with the comments of posters in mind:
TENTATIVE TOP 100--- AND THEN SOME: 1. Winston Churchill 2. Ronald Reagan 3. Franklin Roosevelt 4. Margaret Thatcher 5. Harry Truman 6. George Marshall 7. Dwight Eisenhower 8. Chester Nimitz 9. Douglas McArthur 10. George Orwell 11. William F. Buckley, Jr. 12. Alexander Solzhenitsyn 13. Andrei Sakharov 14. Lech Walesa 15. Vaclav Havel 16. George Bush 17. Helmut Kohl 18. Konrad Adenauer 19. Charles DeGaulle 20. John Paul II 21. Milton Friedman 22. Fred Hayek 23. John XXIII 24. Martin Luther King 25. Mikhail Gorbachev 26. T.S. Eliot 27. D.H. Lawrence 28. James Joyce 29. G.B. Shaw 29. Albert Camus 30. Franz Kafka 31. Herman Hesse 32. Thomas Mann 33. Samuel Becket 34. Martin Heidegger 35. Karl Jaspers 36. Martin Buber 37. D.T. Suzuki 38. C.S. Lewis 39. G.K. Chesterton 40. Henry Ford 41. The Wright Brothers (in tandem) 42. Marconi/Tesla (acknowledging the dispute) 43. Vladimir Zworkin/Philo Farnsworth (both contributed crucially to television) 44. Alan Turing (computer) 45. George Stibitz (more or less the father of the computer) 46. Goddard 47. Von Braun 48. Marie and Pierre Curie (in tandem) 49. Albert Einstein 50. Niels Bohr/Werner Heisenberg 51. Robert Watson- Watt (radar) 52. Gordon Moore/Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet) 53. Bardeen/Shockley/Brattain (the transistor) 54. Hoff/Mazor/Faggin (the microprocessor) 55. Paul Erlich (chemotherapy) 56. Alexander Fleming (penicillin) 57. Gerhard Domagk (sulfa drugs) 58. Salk/Sabin (polio vaccine) 59. Watson & Crick (DNA model) 60. William Halsted (surgery) 61. The Mayo Brothers (surgery) 62. Niels Bohr 63. Werner Heisenberg 64. Carl Jung 65. H. G. Wells 66. Aldous Huxley 67. D.W. Griffith 68. Charles Chaplin 69. Frank Capra 70. Fritz Lang 71. John Huston 72. Orson Welles 73. Jean Renoir 74. Federico Fellini 75. Ingmar Bergman 76. Akira Kurosawa 77. Stanley Kubrick 78. Boris Yeltsin 79. Nelson Mandela 80. Duke Ellington 81. George & Ira Gershwin 82. Irving Berlin 83. The Beatles 84. Barry Gordy 85. Bob Dylan 86. Louis Sullivan 87. Pablo Picasso 88. Henri Matisse 89. Piet Mondrian 90. Wassily Kandinsky 91. Constantin Brancusi 92. Marcel Duchamp 93. Jackson Pollack 94. Willem De Kooning 95. Frank Lloyd Wright 96. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 97. Walter Gropius 98. Le Courbousier 99. Elvis Presley 100.Agnes DeMille/Martha Graham
I am happy to invite further comments, and, I hope, more discussion. When there have been some changes, I will change the heading to reflect them....... |