Interesting list, RTev. And original.
For example, there were two names on there I had never heard of (I confess, I confess!): Alfred Sloan and Robert Noyce. So of course I looked them up. And it brought home to me something that I knew, but had not formulated: and that is, that often the people who truly AFFECT our lives the most are not "famous." That certainly has been true of "captains of industry," few of whom (despite the million-dollar salaries they pull down these days) are widely known to the general public.
I pulled a blank on Lee de Forest, too. Now, if he invented the thingamajub that transistors were invented to replace, who invented the transistor? Shouldn't he be on the list as well? <g>
In some areas, I suspect, your own tastes took over. Only one novelist (Joyce) and no poets; but two photographers (Weston,Cartier Bresson) and three movie directors (Welles, Ford, Renoir). Hmmm.
And if I were going to pick the most influential photographer, I might go for Alfred Stieglitz. Or, for W. Edward Smith, whose Life Magazine photographs -- such as those of Albert Schweitzer in his leper colony, or the "Pieta" of the Japanese mother with her
mercury-poisoned daughter -- literally helped shape the way Americans
looked at the world. For that matter, now that I think about it, individual photographs by Smith truly deserve to be called Great. They are carefully composed, meticulously developed, full of real thought, and memorable in a way that no other photographs I can think of are.
Anyway, lots of room for fruitful debate here.. |
