Famous People You Probably Never Heard Of

Sometimes there are things we find out about people which are truly incredible and sometimes it is about people we least would expect it from. Bill Blass the fashion designer was a member of a secret U.S. Army unit in World War II. It was known officially as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. One of the more popular names for the unit was the Phantom Army. Their mission was to fool the enemy into thinking they were other units. They would use blowup tanks and trucks, use fake radio transmissions and all sorts of other foolery to convince the enemy these other units were in places they were not. This came in very handy for surprise attacks and invasions. Their mission was kept a secret until 1996 when only parts of it were released.

It was just another day for security guard Frank Wills as he patrolled the Democratic National Headquarters. As he was going through the halls of the building he noticed a couple of doors were being held open with tape so he removed it. When he made his rounds again he noticed the doors were taped open again. This alerted him to the fact something strange was going on so he called the police. This led to the arrest of burglars and eventually to the downfall of President Nixon. The guard had been working as a security guard at Watergate.

Here is a question for you, where did democracy first come from? It didn’t start in the United States, hat is for sure. We have to trace it back to the Greeks, but which Greek? No it wasn’t Plato, Aristotle or Socrates, it was Clesthenes who first introduced it. He followed some of the principles introduced by Solon and introduced it to Athens. He created citizenship for all those free men living in Athens and Attica. He then introduced reforms in many areas and all this started in 508 B.C. Every citizen over the age of 30 years became eligible to sit on a council, this allowed them to get involved in the everyday decisions of their government.

In 1828 it was believed we couldn’t synthesize anything which was used by a living being, but later that year this theory, which had been believed for centuries, was proven wrong by a scientist in Germany. His name was Friedrich Wohler. He was in his lab trying to create ammonia cyanate, but something went wrong. Sometimes these mistakes can account for incredible discoveries and this was the case this time. The belief had been the materials of life were separated from everything else by an invisible force and you couldn’t duplicate any of them from inanimate substances. Wohler’s discovery led to the field of organic chemistry.

Every day we get into our cars and put on our seatbelts. It was not always this way and when I was young there were no seatbelts in cars. Ford had tried installing them, but met with disastrous sales that year and had to forget the project. Today they have become common place and saved a lot of lives. Who do we have to thank for this? The man who invented the three point seat belt was Niels Bohlin. He was a Swedish engineer who patented the three point belt system in 1962. Before that the only seat belts available for cars were lap belts which you usually had to be installed aftermarket. He died in 2002, but he must have died happy knowing how many lives he was responsible for saving. Volvo made the belt design free to all auto manufacturers, a very unusual and charitable move in our profit driven society.

Can one man have saved more lives than were lost in World War II? It seems one did and his name was Norman Borlaug. He was responsible for creating a strain of wheat which allowed many countries to more than double their output of wheat thus preventing starvation in many places. He was one of the greatest American biologists and known as “the father of the Green Revolution.” He received the Nobel Prize, The Presidential Medal of Freedom, The Congressional Gold Medal and the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award. His discoveries turned around the Mexican economy by increasing their wheat yields and allowing them to become an exporter of wheat. It is estimated a billion people are alive today because of his discovery.

One of my favorite stories is about a Soviet colonel who actually saved us from World War III. His name is Stanislav Petrov. During the period of the Cold War both sides were very nervous and ever vigilant, because they were each scared the other would launch a surprise nuclear attack. Petrov was a true hero. He had been in charge of a rocket facility at the early warning center in the Moscow Region and a missile had been detected heading from the United States toward the Soviet Union. When he reported this to his superiors he was ordered to fire his missiles, but he refused saying the United States would not have fired only one missile if they were attacking. It turned out to be a bug in the Soviet system and Petrov had saved the world. He received the Dresden Peace Prize for his efforts.

The last person I would like to talk about is Stefan Odobeja who just might turn out to be the most important person of all. It may take us a few more decades to realize this. He is known as the father of Cybernetics. He published his works in 1938 and 1939 and in 1941 he was already laying the foundations in this field. As cybernetic systems become more aware and depending how we handle this, we will either have Mr. Odobeja to thank or curse. I imagine if we land up in a terminator society he may become one of the most hated people ever to have lived, but if robots become our assistants and maybe even our friends than no one will hear his name mentioned. Such is life.