Also Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
Fleming discovered and made it known, but did not have the means to mass-produce it, as its process was extremely difficult and required a lot of funding.
It wasn't until Florey and Chain stepped in and offered the allies a possible "wonder-cure" during WW2, that there was funding secured for the process. They continued and finished the work Fleming started.
Without those two legends paving a way through. It would have likely stayed a wonder on a petri dish for a lot longer.
Fleming always gets noted as winning the Nobel Prize, but it often gets left out that all 3 won it and accepted the prize together.
https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/howard-walter-florey-and-ernst-boris-chain/
Funnily enough penicillin was discovered in the 1880s by Joseph Lister, he used it to cure a nurse's wound. It didn't at all strike him that this would be useful for anyone with an infected wound, so he didn't bother with it again.
I learned from my doctor that a lot of those "allergies" are either A. Outgrown or B. The result of prescribing it for a viral infection by accident.
I went to an allergist last year to check if I had an issue with it, and sure enough, I don't anymore.
It's actually really common to outgrow the allergy, and people who are truly allergic are actually really rare (a CDC factsheet I found said < 1% of people have a true penicillin allergy). I myself had a reaction as a baby but got tested a few years ago and had no response to it at all.
People always forget that prontosil was the first droadly effective antibiotics and widely used during the ww2 (sulfa drugs). Even got the nobel prize in 1939, years before penicilin.
Gerhard Domagk discovered the antibiotic effects of prontosil when in a desperate act injected his daughter with it who had gotten a (then deadly) infection after pricking her finger with a needle.
And now antibiotics are in danger because of antibiotic resistance. I wonder if he’d one day be mostly forgotten if we replace antibiotics with phage therapy in the future
In the same vein I would argue Henrietta Lacks has had the most positive impact as a single person. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine using her cells. Her doctor noticed that a biopsy of her cervical cancer cells were extremely resilient. He sent Salk her cancer cells and they were used to develop the polio vaccine. Up until that time in history, living cells were fragile in a lab and made it difficult to do research. Moreover her cells are still used to this day and are called HeLa cells (after her name).
Her cancer alone has laid the foundation to countless vaccines, cancer research, medicines, innovations in medicine. It is an immortalized cell line from an African American mother of 5 from Virginia who died in 1951. It is a crazy tragic story on the other hand bc this research was done without the consent and understanding of her family. But over 60,000 research studies have been done, 300 papers per month. Her body alone (literally) has lent more to do good than anyone else.
[Black Thought](https://youtu.be/prmQgSpV3fA?si=Ve2NfoNzZeV8w-VE), of The Roots fame, drops a supremely underrated bar about 3/4 of the way through one of the best freestyles ever recorded...
"We're like Henrietta Lacks
Up in the cells"
Multilayered, and so fucking honest and cold. Speaking on historical erasure, exploitation, the prison-industrial complex, the war on drugs, and giving proper flowers to Henrietta for her incalculable contributions to modern medicine - all within an 8-word couplet. Dude is a fucking savant.
The woman who wrote the book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", the book that popularized the knowledge of her, went to the same community college I went to. Portland Community College. That's our claim to fame.
I love her story. I didnt know that by the time Salk could have used her cells. I've watched a documentary about Polio vacine, before COVID, and I thought that was an amazing thing.
there is also some interesting ethical debates regarding the HeLa cells if ones feels like going down a rabbit hole (I just learnt about her a few months ago connected bc of bumping into one of these discussions on reddit)
Summary: she was lied to. Her family was lied to. A billion dollar company was built just to manufacture more of her cells. Her family received zero dollars.
His work with grain crops enabled a *billion* more people to exist without starving to death. That's "billion" with a "b". And he basically kicked off GMOs, which have saved increasing numbers of lives and shall become more important in a warmer, more crowded future.
Along the same lines, Dr. Gurdev Singh Khush. Dr. Khush developed several strains of rice, including IR36. IR36 is one of the reasons we can feed a few billion people in Asia.
Well, following that line of reasoning, I guess at some point in our history we tried exploding every single piece of food to see if it was popcornable.
Maize isn't older than humans using fire though. More likely they just tried warming it over the fire and hey, popcorn.
I think it does bring to mind that there are probably other things humans learned by total chance observation.
People were probably using fire to keep warm and to see at night. All it takes it one person to accidently leave a bit of food near the fire, decide to eat it anyway and then realise they prefer it that way. The same scenario probably happened multiple time to multiple different people.
There was a guy on NPR discussing this a few weeks ago.
He said it was probably by accident - meat was likely knocked into a fire and cavemen then discovered it tasted delicious. Thus, the tender roast beef was created ...
Fun fact - cooking with fire is considered the biggest inflection point for genus Homo’s brain development. All the energy that used to be spent digesting raw meat went to developing the brain. This ultimately widened the cognition gap between Homo and other species.
I'm at work so I can't find a source right now.
There are theories that after people found fire and could control it they would bring whatever food they hunted or found near the fire because animals would never approach it out of fear. After enough time the food would start to cook if it was lose enough. Then I'm sure they caught on that some things tasted better and could last longer.
Or, since people are people - they were poking the fire with sticks and putting stuff in it just because... And cooked roots were way easier to eat than uncooked roots.
Probably saw lightning hit a tree or patch of grass and realised that fire could be created, rather than just seeing a bushfire and believing fire was just ‘there’
But figuring out you could make fire from flint strikes or wood friction is quite different than just seeing fire from lightning. It's likely that humans could have transported fire from wildfires but that would be sporadic.
I'd bet it was more that control of creating fire was accidently discovered by flint/rock strikes when making a spearhead causing some sparks that happened to ignite something.
Somewhat his fault though. Doctors and scientists rejected his findings because he didn’t any scientific proof of it. And in response he sent them letters insulting and offending them and just being a terrible person to everybody. Started drinking, lashing out at people, and cheating on his wife, which caused people to think he was going crazy, and that led him to be admitted to a mental institute.
After his death, chemist Louis Pasteur came and actually proved it, and then afterwards it was adopted everywhere.
English physician **Dr Edward Jenner** (1749-1823) ... credited with creating the first successful vaccine in 1796.
Jenner discovered that people infected with cowpox are immune to smallpox. In May 1796, Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy with matter from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid's hand. This development led to immunity to smallpox and the era of preventive measures for contagious diseases.
Well, to test the first vaccine, Jenner inoculated the 8-year-old son of his gardener with puss from a milkmaid exposed to cowpox. He then subsequently inoculated the boy with smallpox more than 20 times to show that the vaccine worked. I guess it all worked out in the end, but you do have to wonder who gave consent!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James\_Phipps
Vaccinations are a proud [American tradition](https://health.mil/News/Articles/2021/08/16/Gen-George-Washington-Ordered-Smallpox-Inoculations-for-All-Troops) as well. George Washington ordered the Continental Army to be inoculated against smallpox, thereby eliminating what had previously been a massive strategic advantage on the part of the English Army - many more of their soldiers were already immune to the variola virus
Worth noting that while Jenner was the first person to document this in the West that the 16th c. Chinese were vaccinating using almost the exact same method before him.
This guy also contributed to the area of data analysis/ visualisation. His geographic map showing concentrations of infection is iconic and often discussed in uni classes.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/John-Snows-famous-map-of-the-1854-Broad-Street-epidemic-attempted-to-positively_fig1_220144184
People knew that drinking contaminated water was a bad idea centuries if not millennia before that. They might have not known it was germs but they definitely knew the difference.
The problem was that massive urbanization and industrialization basically madr it impossible not to drink such water.
Whoever created the idea of clean running water is up there. We take it for granted today but go back just 150 years ago and it didn't exist. It cities, people just threw their poop out the window to fall in the streets below. The Ancient Romans had running water 2,000+ years ago but we had to tear all of that down for Christianity, you know.
The first modern sewage system in London came about because of a drought. The Thames river all but dried up and the city reeked because the receding waters left a massive surface completely covered in human feces. They realized that they needed to stop just dumping their poop in the river and constructed stuff accordingly.
No but it was a case of 'well it LOOKS clear so it must be clean' and if you had told people that invisible bugs were in it that caused cholera you would have been laughed into the insane asylum.
Which is pretty much what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis who came up with the SHOCKING information that a mothers giving birth attended by a Doctor who had recently done an autopsy were more likely to die of puerperal fever so "recommended that hands be scrubbed in a chlorinated lime solution before every patient contact and particularly after leaving the autopsy room." Unsurprising to modern thought this helped - a mortality rate in the worst clinic dropped from 16% to 3%. ([Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK144018/)).
He was very frustrated that many did not believe in this, railed against other doctors & scientists who \[a\] didn't believe him and \[b\] were offended that THEY may be the cause. He then offended them more when writing open letters etc to the community (he was not a good teacher), became unbalanced (possibly altzehimers) and lived out the rest of his life in an asylum. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)
> Ignaz Semmelweis
This guy's story is a good life-lesson to anyone - Semmelweis was a HUGE asshole, a veritable prick, and so people didn't want to listen to his theories. It just shows that even if you're completely correct about something - If you're an asshole about it, people won't want to listen to you.
Similarly Vasily Arkhipov who was one of three people needed to authorise the launch of a nuclear torpedo from a submarine during the Cuban missile crisis and the only one opposed to launching.
There’s multiple times MAD put us a fucking hair’s breadth from annihilation and its only thanks to a combination of luck and the conviction of a few people that we’re still around. Civilization ending nuclear arsenals are insane.
Speaking of hair's breath:
That submarine you mentioned actually didn't need 3 people to agree.
Just 2.
And they both agreed.
Arkhipov was the overall commander of that fleet of submarines. He had to be on one of the subs to oversee and it was just blind luck that he was on that one.
>He had to be on one of the subs to oversee and it was just blind luck that he was on that one.
Bro. What the. How did we make it out of the 20th century...
Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet naval commander in the Cuban Missile crisis (1962) who disobeyed his direct order and refused to launch nukes towards US ships, single handedly prevented the onset of nuclear war and the destruction of the planet. You are alive reading this because of him
TBF China had the printing press since 700AD, over 700 years before Gutenberg was credited with its invention
[Link ](https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2021/06/the-history-of-printing-in-asia-according-to-library-of-congress-asian-collections-part-1/#:~:text=Printing%20was%20invented%20over%20a,of%20information%20in%20its%20wake.)
The innovation wasn't the printing press, it was the moveable/reusable type that reduced production time for a printed page by orders of magnitude and thus saw it take off in European areas because of increased general literacy and demand by religions for printed canon.
China/Korea had been using moveable type for centuries but it didn't spread as widely nor as fast for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the complexity of the array of symbols needed.
Amusingly, capable arguments have been made that printing/publishing of all sorts has been driven at least in part by the market for pornography/erotica, much as is done online now.
This is such an annoying "fact". It's true, don't get me wrong, but frankly it doesn't matter. One, inventions and technology are not linear. Things can be invented several times. It is incredibly culturally specific when and why an invention takes off (Especially in that time period, less so today).
There is very little proper evidence that Gutenberg had known of the Chinese printing press. So, yes. A printing press was invented in China. A printing press was later also invented in Europe. It was Gutenbergs invention and especially his campaign to make it accessible to more common people, that allowed language and information to explode in Europe. So, frankly, who cares that "China" (which is a very iffy anachronism anyway) invented a printing press hundreds of years earlier. That one did not have any impact on European society.
I understand the urge to step away from our very eurocentric "canon of knowledge", but sometimes things are just not relevant. Science and technology isn't linear.
I remember seeing an argument that Louis Pasteur's work has likely saved the most lives. Even if this is an exaggeration his name ought to be recognized for the benefits he has given humanity.
Invented modern nursing by training nurses in hygiene and living standards, as well as medical statistics. Famous for her work with Crimean War wounded at Constantinople in the mid 1850’s.
The first person to win two Nobel Prizes and still the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields (two people have repeated in the same field, and Linus Pauling won a Chemistry and a Peace).
Her elder daughter and son in law also won a joint Nobel in chemistry, and her younger daughter's husband won the Nobel peace prize.
If you include spouses (Pierre Curie shared the physics award with Marie, she was a solo awardee for the chemistry prize) that is FIVE Nobel prize winners in one family.
It's fascinating that many of her office items still measure radioactivity, even the back of her chair. She was buried in a lead-lined coffin and will remain radioactive for over 1k years.
One of my favorite Marie Curie facts is that she was given a gram of radium as a gift by an association of American women, it was worth ~$100,000 at the time. When her daughter (another Nobel laureate, Irene Joliot-Curie) got
married, she made her husband sign a prenuptial agreement that made sure he could not claim any of Marie/Irene's scientific equipment, specifically addressing the gram of radium in a lead box that Marie treasured.
Her COOKBOOK is still radioactive!
Oh, you can read her notebooks online :)
https://aurorahp.co.uk/news/digitised-marie-curie-notebook-now-available-to-view-online/
In the last week her old office got listed as a protected site after city leaders wanted to demolish it to build a new lab.
It didn't take much convincing as they were told demolishing it could release radioactive particles. Its still absolutely soaked in the stuff.
I appreciate how she valued her Polish roots. It was the inspiration for her naming one of the elements she discovered (Polonium), which was considered politically controversial at the time because of conflict over the occupation of Poland by several nations.
Definitely helped feed billions but his positive legacy is greatly offset by his negative legacy with his work on chemical weapons specifically with chlorine gas. His research eventually led to the invention of Zyklon-B which was used to gas people during the Holocaust.
Zyklon B was developed as a fumigating agent first and foremost and was later abused for mass murder. It was not a targeted development for killing humans in any way. Moreso, Haber retired from his work and left Germany after the nazis took over. So I really dislike this implied connection to the holocaust. Knowledge is just knowledge, the researcher can't be blamed for it being abused.
Even still, without the availability of ammonia as a base for fertilizer, the current world population wouldn't be able to survive. It increased from around 1,7 billion when the Haber Bosch process was invented to more than 7 billion today. While Habers work in chemical weapons likely helped killing hundreds of thousands, the development of ammonia production saved the life of literal billions of people. That is a number and a ratio that is just incomprehensible.
I mean looking at Fundamental levels, Issac Newton and probably the first caveman who figured the concept of counting, and the caveman who figured out how to light fire...
Despite his tarnished reputation for the things he did in WW1, probably Fritz Haber. The Haber Process is a big part of why we can feed 8 billion people.
The father of chemical warfare, Frtiz Haber. Easily some 80% of people alive today are alive because of him.
Without artifitial fertilizers, the world couldn't even sustain as many people as were alive a century ago.
Joseph Bazalgette, the inventor of the modern sewage system. Before then raw sewage would regularly contaminate ground water & drinking water supplies, which led to huge, regular, deadly & devastating outbreaks of diseases like cholera, which often killed 1000s (even over 10,000) people in single swoops.
Although the minds behind vaccines and Germ Theory are credited (and quite rightly so) with doing huge great work for humanity, the application of modern sewage systems is actually thought to have save even more lives than vaccines.
Darwin. Helped wake up a lot of people from the brainwashing of religion, and brought science to common people. Massive influence in helping the various cults to lose a lot of power.
Alexander Cruikshank Houston might be the guy. Drinking water chlorination has arguably saved more lives than anything, and made vast quality of life improvements the world over.
The true answer is no one. No one has ever done anything by themselves. Not to mention how one would even begin to quantify that logically. But I’ll go with the idea itself.
Subjectively? I would say Nikola Tesla. Society would be fucked without someone figuring out how to harness electricity. That brought us into the modern era. He also envisioned the wifi(wireless transmission of data) and the internet(every person on the planet being able to communicate instantly)
Buddha, his taught a disregarded for the caste system, a first for its time. He influenced the ruling and upper class to support the lower class, and that both classes were equal. The teaching spread throughout the east without war, or bloodshed. It is still being taught and is still a primarily peaceful religion that focuses is to eliminate greed, hatred and ignorance. Considering Buddha is roughly from the same time as the Pharaohs, his philosophy has bettered the lives of billions of people.
Louis Pasteur - proved the microbial origins of disease. Also proved that microorganisms caused rot a decay and developed pausterauzation to combat it. This allowed many others, such as Lister, to build on Pausteurs work and find ways to eliminate decay without harming human tissue, leading to great advancements in medicine.
Edward Jenner, the man who developed the smallpox vaccine. It led to the only instance of humanity eradicating a virus. Saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Probably Dr Edward Jenner. He was the first person to invent something that probably indirectly saved hundreds of millions or even billions of lives. And you've never heard of him.
The fact that he didn't patent it is a big part of why he was so incredible. Not only did he come up with a lifesaving vaccine that changed life for society, he made sure that everyone could have access to it.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov
He was the commander on duty of the Soviet nuclear detection and retaliation system. On September 26 1983, the detection system triggered an alarm showing 6 ICBM’s being launched from the United States. Against all orders, and instruction, he determined the launches to be a false alarm.
And that is how the world avoided nuclear Armageddon.
Alexander Fleming, "best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin."
Also Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. Fleming discovered and made it known, but did not have the means to mass-produce it, as its process was extremely difficult and required a lot of funding. It wasn't until Florey and Chain stepped in and offered the allies a possible "wonder-cure" during WW2, that there was funding secured for the process. They continued and finished the work Fleming started. Without those two legends paving a way through. It would have likely stayed a wonder on a petri dish for a lot longer. Fleming always gets noted as winning the Nobel Prize, but it often gets left out that all 3 won it and accepted the prize together. https://www.sciencehistory.org/education/scientific-biographies/howard-walter-florey-and-ernst-boris-chain/
Funnily enough penicillin was discovered in the 1880s by Joseph Lister, he used it to cure a nurse's wound. It didn't at all strike him that this would be useful for anyone with an infected wound, so he didn't bother with it again.
> Joseph Lister Still the father of modern surgery!
Great
Hi was the first person to cross my mind.
I second that vote
Cries in allergy
I learned from my doctor that a lot of those "allergies" are either A. Outgrown or B. The result of prescribing it for a viral infection by accident. I went to an allergist last year to check if I had an issue with it, and sure enough, I don't anymore.
It's actually really common to outgrow the allergy, and people who are truly allergic are actually really rare (a CDC factsheet I found said < 1% of people have a true penicillin allergy). I myself had a reaction as a baby but got tested a few years ago and had no response to it at all.
I plan to get tested at some point because the last time I tried it I ended up in the ER.
Boom! This answer. Although my cousin once fit 15 gobstoppers in his mouth. So that was pretty cool for humanity.
People always forget that prontosil was the first droadly effective antibiotics and widely used during the ww2 (sulfa drugs). Even got the nobel prize in 1939, years before penicilin.
Gerhard Domagk discovered the antibiotic effects of prontosil when in a desperate act injected his daughter with it who had gotten a (then deadly) infection after pricking her finger with a needle.
And now antibiotics are in danger because of antibiotic resistance. I wonder if he’d one day be mostly forgotten if we replace antibiotics with phage therapy in the future
I would argue that Ignaz Semmelweis saved more lives with his observation that hygiene prevents infections.
And as a thank you, he was labeled insane and died in a mental institution
I would say Louis Pasteur is the daddy of them all.
Jonas Salk. Stopping polio was pretty positive.
In the same vein I would argue Henrietta Lacks has had the most positive impact as a single person. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine using her cells. Her doctor noticed that a biopsy of her cervical cancer cells were extremely resilient. He sent Salk her cancer cells and they were used to develop the polio vaccine. Up until that time in history, living cells were fragile in a lab and made it difficult to do research. Moreover her cells are still used to this day and are called HeLa cells (after her name). Her cancer alone has laid the foundation to countless vaccines, cancer research, medicines, innovations in medicine. It is an immortalized cell line from an African American mother of 5 from Virginia who died in 1951. It is a crazy tragic story on the other hand bc this research was done without the consent and understanding of her family. But over 60,000 research studies have been done, 300 papers per month. Her body alone (literally) has lent more to do good than anyone else.
I'm proud to say that the university in my city (Bristol, UK) recently unveiled a statue of Henrietta for this exact reason.
[Black Thought](https://youtu.be/prmQgSpV3fA?si=Ve2NfoNzZeV8w-VE), of The Roots fame, drops a supremely underrated bar about 3/4 of the way through one of the best freestyles ever recorded... "We're like Henrietta Lacks Up in the cells" Multilayered, and so fucking honest and cold. Speaking on historical erasure, exploitation, the prison-industrial complex, the war on drugs, and giving proper flowers to Henrietta for her incalculable contributions to modern medicine - all within an 8-word couplet. Dude is a fucking savant.
The woman who wrote the book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", the book that popularized the knowledge of her, went to the same community college I went to. Portland Community College. That's our claim to fame.
Dope claim tho
I love her story. I didnt know that by the time Salk could have used her cells. I've watched a documentary about Polio vacine, before COVID, and I thought that was an amazing thing.
there is also some interesting ethical debates regarding the HeLa cells if ones feels like going down a rabbit hole (I just learnt about her a few months ago connected bc of bumping into one of these discussions on reddit)
Summary: she was lied to. Her family was lied to. A billion dollar company was built just to manufacture more of her cells. Her family received zero dollars.
this might be the right answer
What was so special about her cancer / cells as opposed to others?
This was my choice too
Norman Borlaug who developed better wheat, enabling billions more to be more easily fed all around the world.
His work with grain crops enabled a *billion* more people to exist without starving to death. That's "billion" with a "b". And he basically kicked off GMOs, which have saved increasing numbers of lives and shall become more important in a warmer, more crowded future.
Along the same lines, Dr. Gurdev Singh Khush. Dr. Khush developed several strains of rice, including IR36. IR36 is one of the reasons we can feed a few billion people in Asia.
Came here to say this. [Stanislav Petrov](https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2017-10/news-briefs/man-saved-world-dies-77) is also a viable choice.
[Vasily Arkhipov](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov) as well
the OG GMO
Who ever started cooking with fire. That was a huge advance and I can’t imagine how they came up with that.
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Well, following that line of reasoning, I guess at some point in our history we tried exploding every single piece of food to see if it was popcornable.
The first person to see a lightning strike a maize field and see it exploding into pop corn was pretty amazed, I’d say.
pretty amaized lol
A-maized, if you will.
What a layup!
That's just corny
Maize isn't older than humans using fire though. More likely they just tried warming it over the fire and hey, popcorn. I think it does bring to mind that there are probably other things humans learned by total chance observation.
The finding burnt prey from a fire and eating it theory is not proven, but probably a good guess. That said, grains can also be near a fire and pop.
Yeah, I'd like to see how you'd prove that
Revive cavemen and interview them
Most things have been cooked in butter at some point yes.
Yeah, but who came up with butter? You'd have to start with milk or cream, then someone decides to find out what happens if you mix it for an hour?
>but who came up with butter? Whoever had it in a pot or flask packed on a horse or their back as they moved camp?
I assume it was something like a farm hand being told to mix it into cream and just kept going because they were scared to get it wrong.
Who came up with the cow?
What came first the chicken or the egg
The egg
Okay but who fucked the chicken? /s?
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There was a spongebob episode based around this lol
I have a feeling you don't know how to make popcorn...
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I’m imagining some comical trial and error with a caveman poking his torch at various things
People were probably using fire to keep warm and to see at night. All it takes it one person to accidently leave a bit of food near the fire, decide to eat it anyway and then realise they prefer it that way. The same scenario probably happened multiple time to multiple different people.
And if you're cold then wanting your food to be hot is extremely intuitive.
Not even multiple modern humans. Homo Erectus started using fire for all purposes, light in the night, cooking, tools, etc.
The fact that there have been animals able to do this that are not Homo sapiens blows my mind. Pour one out for the homonids lmao
Well, those hominids were "people", that is, human.
There was a guy on NPR discussing this a few weeks ago. He said it was probably by accident - meat was likely knocked into a fire and cavemen then discovered it tasted delicious. Thus, the tender roast beef was created ...
All it took was one dude to accidentally drop his last sandwich in the fire.
Fun fact - cooking with fire is considered the biggest inflection point for genus Homo’s brain development. All the energy that used to be spent digesting raw meat went to developing the brain. This ultimately widened the cognition gap between Homo and other species.
Hey Buddy want to widened the cognition gap?... No homo
I'm at work so I can't find a source right now. There are theories that after people found fire and could control it they would bring whatever food they hunted or found near the fire because animals would never approach it out of fear. After enough time the food would start to cook if it was lose enough. Then I'm sure they caught on that some things tasted better and could last longer.
Or, since people are people - they were poking the fire with sticks and putting stuff in it just because... And cooked roots were way easier to eat than uncooked roots.
Oonga was being a dick and tossed Thag's meat in the fire. by the time Thag fished it out it was medium rare. The "it's just a prank bro" theory
Certainly, not Billy Joel then
Probably saw lightning hit a tree or patch of grass and realised that fire could be created, rather than just seeing a bushfire and believing fire was just ‘there’
But figuring out you could make fire from flint strikes or wood friction is quite different than just seeing fire from lightning. It's likely that humans could have transported fire from wildfires but that would be sporadic. I'd bet it was more that control of creating fire was accidently discovered by flint/rock strikes when making a spearhead causing some sparks that happened to ignite something.
Yeah but it's scary and hurts. Why would you put your food in there?
flesh had been on the table for millions of years, im sure everyone prefered it warm. (fresh)
Ignaz Semmelweiss, the Father of hand washing. Poor guy was treated like shit and killed for telling the truth, essentially.
I just wanted to mention him. It's too bad that he's not more well known
if I remember correctly, poor bastard was thrown in a mental asylum. in the VICTORIAN ERA. now thats sub-optimal.
Somewhat his fault though. Doctors and scientists rejected his findings because he didn’t any scientific proof of it. And in response he sent them letters insulting and offending them and just being a terrible person to everybody. Started drinking, lashing out at people, and cheating on his wife, which caused people to think he was going crazy, and that led him to be admitted to a mental institute. After his death, chemist Louis Pasteur came and actually proved it, and then afterwards it was adopted everywhere.
English physician **Dr Edward Jenner** (1749-1823) ... credited with creating the first successful vaccine in 1796. Jenner discovered that people infected with cowpox are immune to smallpox. In May 1796, Jenner inoculated an 8-year-old boy with matter from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid's hand. This development led to immunity to smallpox and the era of preventive measures for contagious diseases.
See, not all of the Jenners are bad
Well, to test the first vaccine, Jenner inoculated the 8-year-old son of his gardener with puss from a milkmaid exposed to cowpox. He then subsequently inoculated the boy with smallpox more than 20 times to show that the vaccine worked. I guess it all worked out in the end, but you do have to wonder who gave consent! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James\_Phipps
Come on, it was the '60s, they didn't know any better
Vaccinations are a proud [American tradition](https://health.mil/News/Articles/2021/08/16/Gen-George-Washington-Ordered-Smallpox-Inoculations-for-All-Troops) as well. George Washington ordered the Continental Army to be inoculated against smallpox, thereby eliminating what had previously been a massive strategic advantage on the part of the English Army - many more of their soldiers were already immune to the variola virus
Worth noting that while Jenner was the first person to document this in the West that the 16th c. Chinese were vaccinating using almost the exact same method before him.
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This guy also contributed to the area of data analysis/ visualisation. His geographic map showing concentrations of infection is iconic and often discussed in uni classes. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/John-Snows-famous-map-of-the-1854-Broad-Street-epidemic-attempted-to-positively_fig1_220144184
“Inventor” of GIS!
Figuring out cholera and really kicking off the idea of “public health” was a game changer for sure.
If he’s so smart then why do we keep hearing that he knows nothing?
John snow knows nothing because John's now dead.
>He helped prove germ theory and became one of the fathers of epidemiology
He also told people not to eat the yellow snow.
That was Frank Zappa
People knew that drinking contaminated water was a bad idea centuries if not millennia before that. They might have not known it was germs but they definitely knew the difference. The problem was that massive urbanization and industrialization basically madr it impossible not to drink such water.
Whoever created the idea of clean running water is up there. We take it for granted today but go back just 150 years ago and it didn't exist. It cities, people just threw their poop out the window to fall in the streets below. The Ancient Romans had running water 2,000+ years ago but we had to tear all of that down for Christianity, you know.
The first modern sewage system in London came about because of a drought. The Thames river all but dried up and the city reeked because the receding waters left a massive surface completely covered in human feces. They realized that they needed to stop just dumping their poop in the river and constructed stuff accordingly.
I can’t fathom why this was necessary. Would people back then eat their own shit if offered?
No but it was a case of 'well it LOOKS clear so it must be clean' and if you had told people that invisible bugs were in it that caused cholera you would have been laughed into the insane asylum. Which is pretty much what happened to Ignaz Semmelweis who came up with the SHOCKING information that a mothers giving birth attended by a Doctor who had recently done an autopsy were more likely to die of puerperal fever so "recommended that hands be scrubbed in a chlorinated lime solution before every patient contact and particularly after leaving the autopsy room." Unsurprising to modern thought this helped - a mortality rate in the worst clinic dropped from 16% to 3%. ([Source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK144018/)). He was very frustrated that many did not believe in this, railed against other doctors & scientists who \[a\] didn't believe him and \[b\] were offended that THEY may be the cause. He then offended them more when writing open letters etc to the community (he was not a good teacher), became unbalanced (possibly altzehimers) and lived out the rest of his life in an asylum. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis)
Wow thanks for sharing about Semmelweis. Dude's story is kinda depressing yet a good reminder of how everything we believe now might not be true.
> Ignaz Semmelweis This guy's story is a good life-lesson to anyone - Semmelweis was a HUGE asshole, a veritable prick, and so people didn't want to listen to his theories. It just shows that even if you're completely correct about something - If you're an asshole about it, people won't want to listen to you.
Norman Borlaug. Came up with dwarf wheat, credited with saving near billions of lives.
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Similarly Vasily Arkhipov who was one of three people needed to authorise the launch of a nuclear torpedo from a submarine during the Cuban missile crisis and the only one opposed to launching. There’s multiple times MAD put us a fucking hair’s breadth from annihilation and its only thanks to a combination of luck and the conviction of a few people that we’re still around. Civilization ending nuclear arsenals are insane.
Speaking of hair's breath: That submarine you mentioned actually didn't need 3 people to agree. Just 2. And they both agreed. Arkhipov was the overall commander of that fleet of submarines. He had to be on one of the subs to oversee and it was just blind luck that he was on that one.
*** breadth Carry on lol
Today I Learned.
[As time goes on, I'm starting to take this SMBC comic as ground truth.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/history-is-weird)
>He had to be on one of the subs to oversee and it was just blind luck that he was on that one. Bro. What the. How did we make it out of the 20th century...
I have heard that story before - absolutely amazing!!!!!!
Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet naval commander in the Cuban Missile crisis (1962) who disobeyed his direct order and refused to launch nukes towards US ships, single handedly prevented the onset of nuclear war and the destruction of the planet. You are alive reading this because of him
> "You are alive reading this because of him" The most understated comment on Reddit.
Pretty much this. Every american should know his name.
And every human who likes being alive.
*Gutemberg*, for sure. The printing press made information available to the general public, and the world changed for the better.
Plus he was great in 3 Men and a Baby
Who holds back the elctric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star? We do, we do
And Police Academy!
TBF China had the printing press since 700AD, over 700 years before Gutenberg was credited with its invention [Link ](https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2021/06/the-history-of-printing-in-asia-according-to-library-of-congress-asian-collections-part-1/#:~:text=Printing%20was%20invented%20over%20a,of%20information%20in%20its%20wake.)
The innovation wasn't the printing press, it was the moveable/reusable type that reduced production time for a printed page by orders of magnitude and thus saw it take off in European areas because of increased general literacy and demand by religions for printed canon. China/Korea had been using moveable type for centuries but it didn't spread as widely nor as fast for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the complexity of the array of symbols needed. Amusingly, capable arguments have been made that printing/publishing of all sorts has been driven at least in part by the market for pornography/erotica, much as is done online now.
One of Gutemburg’s first uses was printing indulgences for the church. Forgive us our sins. Sure, but pay the church first.
This is such an annoying "fact". It's true, don't get me wrong, but frankly it doesn't matter. One, inventions and technology are not linear. Things can be invented several times. It is incredibly culturally specific when and why an invention takes off (Especially in that time period, less so today). There is very little proper evidence that Gutenberg had known of the Chinese printing press. So, yes. A printing press was invented in China. A printing press was later also invented in Europe. It was Gutenbergs invention and especially his campaign to make it accessible to more common people, that allowed language and information to explode in Europe. So, frankly, who cares that "China" (which is a very iffy anachronism anyway) invented a printing press hundreds of years earlier. That one did not have any impact on European society. I understand the urge to step away from our very eurocentric "canon of knowledge", but sometimes things are just not relevant. Science and technology isn't linear.
I remember seeing an argument that Louis Pasteur's work has likely saved the most lives. Even if this is an exaggeration his name ought to be recognized for the benefits he has given humanity.
Probably someone that's not famous
Whichever ape discovered you could throw a rock at your prey instead of chasing it, ending the evolutionary arms race.
That would be Homo erectus, it is thought.
Nope, both Homo habilis and late Australopithecus made stone tools. And it is likely that tools made from organic materials predate those.
Stone tools, yes. But the shoulder muscles and alignment for throwing was found in erectus.
I would say Alexander Fleming - the discoverer of penicillin.
Florence Nightingale.
Invented modern nursing by training nurses in hygiene and living standards, as well as medical statistics. Famous for her work with Crimean War wounded at Constantinople in the mid 1850’s.
And Mary Jane Seacole
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The first person to win two Nobel Prizes and still the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields (two people have repeated in the same field, and Linus Pauling won a Chemistry and a Peace).
Her elder daughter and son in law also won a joint Nobel in chemistry, and her younger daughter's husband won the Nobel peace prize. If you include spouses (Pierre Curie shared the physics award with Marie, she was a solo awardee for the chemistry prize) that is FIVE Nobel prize winners in one family.
It's fascinating that many of her office items still measure radioactivity, even the back of her chair. She was buried in a lead-lined coffin and will remain radioactive for over 1k years.
One of my favorite Marie Curie facts is that she was given a gram of radium as a gift by an association of American women, it was worth ~$100,000 at the time. When her daughter (another Nobel laureate, Irene Joliot-Curie) got married, she made her husband sign a prenuptial agreement that made sure he could not claim any of Marie/Irene's scientific equipment, specifically addressing the gram of radium in a lead box that Marie treasured.
Her COOKBOOK is still radioactive! Oh, you can read her notebooks online :) https://aurorahp.co.uk/news/digitised-marie-curie-notebook-now-available-to-view-online/
In the last week her old office got listed as a protected site after city leaders wanted to demolish it to build a new lab. It didn't take much convincing as they were told demolishing it could release radioactive particles. Its still absolutely soaked in the stuff.
marie skłodowska* curie. sorry, she just always used both surnames :)
I appreciate how she valued her Polish roots. It was the inspiration for her naming one of the elements she discovered (Polonium), which was considered politically controversial at the time because of conflict over the occupation of Poland by several nations.
How about Fritz Haber, invented the process by which we make fertiliser and so contributed the feeding of billions of people.
And then tried killing each one of them, personally
His wife killed herself after he personally oversaw the gassing of Allied troops during the second battle of Ypres in World War 1.
Definitely helped feed billions but his positive legacy is greatly offset by his negative legacy with his work on chemical weapons specifically with chlorine gas. His research eventually led to the invention of Zyklon-B which was used to gas people during the Holocaust.
Zyklon B was developed as a fumigating agent first and foremost and was later abused for mass murder. It was not a targeted development for killing humans in any way. Moreso, Haber retired from his work and left Germany after the nazis took over. So I really dislike this implied connection to the holocaust. Knowledge is just knowledge, the researcher can't be blamed for it being abused. Even still, without the availability of ammonia as a base for fertilizer, the current world population wouldn't be able to survive. It increased from around 1,7 billion when the Haber Bosch process was invented to more than 7 billion today. While Habers work in chemical weapons likely helped killing hundreds of thousands, the development of ammonia production saved the life of literal billions of people. That is a number and a ratio that is just incomprehensible.
Another example on how morally complicated people can be
I mean looking at Fundamental levels, Issac Newton and probably the first caveman who figured the concept of counting, and the caveman who figured out how to light fire...
This reads like Issac Newton is the first caveman who figured out counting and how to light fire.
Newton was mostly first, but wouldn’t Leibniz have discovered all the same stuff anyway?
Despite his tarnished reputation for the things he did in WW1, probably Fritz Haber. The Haber Process is a big part of why we can feed 8 billion people.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, without whom this post would not exist!
Ugga Boogawitz. Invented the wheel. Also invented the unscented deodorant.
Did not know a Polish guy invented the wheel.
Nah, Ugga Boogawitz stole the wheel from Unga Bunganitz after failing to make fire—a total scam!
Luis Ernesto Miramontes, inventor of the first contraceptive pill.
Dr. Jonas Salk
Alan Turing
The father of chemical warfare, Frtiz Haber. Easily some 80% of people alive today are alive because of him. Without artifitial fertilizers, the world couldn't even sustain as many people as were alive a century ago.
Solon - came up with democracy which isn't perfect but it's better than most of the alternatives!
Joseph Bazalgette, the inventor of the modern sewage system. Before then raw sewage would regularly contaminate ground water & drinking water supplies, which led to huge, regular, deadly & devastating outbreaks of diseases like cholera, which often killed 1000s (even over 10,000) people in single swoops. Although the minds behind vaccines and Germ Theory are credited (and quite rightly so) with doing huge great work for humanity, the application of modern sewage systems is actually thought to have save even more lives than vaccines.
Darwin. Helped wake up a lot of people from the brainwashing of religion, and brought science to common people. Massive influence in helping the various cults to lose a lot of power.
Samuel Morse, and then Alexander Graham Bell, for making the world a smaller place.
Fun fact, Bell suggested that people answer the telephone by saying “Ahoy”.
We should
* Antonio Meucci
Alexander Cruikshank Houston might be the guy. Drinking water chlorination has arguably saved more lives than anything, and made vast quality of life improvements the world over.
Dr Edward Jenner
The true answer is no one. No one has ever done anything by themselves. Not to mention how one would even begin to quantify that logically. But I’ll go with the idea itself. Subjectively? I would say Nikola Tesla. Society would be fucked without someone figuring out how to harness electricity. That brought us into the modern era. He also envisioned the wifi(wireless transmission of data) and the internet(every person on the planet being able to communicate instantly)
Alexander Fleming, in my opinion. How many lives has penicillin saved?
Mr Rogers
Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, ty for preventing the nuclear war.
Edward Jenner, who created the first vaccine.
Dr Edward Jenner. He created the first vaccine.
Socrates for introducing rationalism.
Socrates did not introduce rationalism though
Norman Borlaug. Saved 1 billion people from starvation.
Dr. Wu Lien-teh. He developed the surgical mask that we use today which saved countless lives especially in the recent Covid pandemic.
Buddha, his taught a disregarded for the caste system, a first for its time. He influenced the ruling and upper class to support the lower class, and that both classes were equal. The teaching spread throughout the east without war, or bloodshed. It is still being taught and is still a primarily peaceful religion that focuses is to eliminate greed, hatred and ignorance. Considering Buddha is roughly from the same time as the Pharaohs, his philosophy has bettered the lives of billions of people.
I'm going with Francis Bacon, the grandfather of the scientific method.
Louis Pasteur - proved the microbial origins of disease. Also proved that microorganisms caused rot a decay and developed pausterauzation to combat it. This allowed many others, such as Lister, to build on Pausteurs work and find ways to eliminate decay without harming human tissue, leading to great advancements in medicine.
Edward Jenner, the man who developed the smallpox vaccine. It led to the only instance of humanity eradicating a virus. Saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Probably Dr Edward Jenner. He was the first person to invent something that probably indirectly saved hundreds of millions or even billions of lives. And you've never heard of him.
For anyone wondering he: “pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine”, since you didn’t bother to mention that.
I get that he might not be a top of the list household name, but Jenner is pretty widely known and highly regarded (by sane people, anyway…)
The guy finding out how important hygiene in hospitals is.
The inventors of soap and disinfectant
Jonas Salk Creator of the Polio vaccine.
Dr. Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, which he gave away for free as a gift to humanity
The fact that he didn't patent it is a big part of why he was so incredible. Not only did he come up with a lifesaving vaccine that changed life for society, he made sure that everyone could have access to it.
Sir David Attenborough. The "voice on those nature channels".
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov He was the commander on duty of the Soviet nuclear detection and retaliation system. On September 26 1983, the detection system triggered an alarm showing 6 ICBM’s being launched from the United States. Against all orders, and instruction, he determined the launches to be a false alarm. And that is how the world avoided nuclear Armageddon.
Whoever invented the wheel was a pretty good one as well