People Ahead of Their Time Some people were just ahead of their time. They might have been scientists, authors, politicians or others, but they have been there throughout history. You might ask how does a politician get ahead of their time, so let me point out something most people are not aware of. Before women were even allowed to vote in the United States, a woman ran for the office of president of the United States. Her name was Victoria Claflin Woodhull. That must have taken a lot of guts. One can only imagine what she went through. Another strange fact was she ran on the Equal Rights Party and they nominated Fredrick Douglass for Vice President but he never acknowledged it and supported her opponent. Many people have heard of Rene Descartes. He was a famous French scientist and philosopher. While he is still famous today, the fact he invented the contact lens has been mostly lost to history. The problem was it was so bulky it made it hard to blink, but it worked. It wasn’t until another 250 years passed before a practical contact lens was made. It is amazing to think a device which monitored the area for as much as 300 plus miles away could have been created without electricity and in the year 132 A.D., but that is exactly what happened. A Chinese inventor named Zhang Heng invented an earthquake detector which actually did a good job. The detector could tell the area where the earthquake came from. When we think about automobiles being invented, we usually give the credit to Karl Benz in 1886. That was when he patented the Benz Motorwagen, but did he really invent the car? The answer is he did not. The inventor of the automobile actually invented the car a lot earlier in 1769. His name was Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot. He had built a very large steam powered tricycle which was built to transport heavy artillery pieces. It did have problems, one of them being it was very slow and another was it didn’t have much power so it needed help getting up hills. The French king was impressed with it however and awarded him a lifetime pension. Dr. Ignaz worked in a maternity clinic in Vienna. He couldn’t help but observe many mothers were dying from a disease which was known as childbed fever. He decided to do a study of the two maternity wards in the hospital. One was run by doctors and the other by midwives and to his surprise he noticed the deaths in the ward run by doctors was 5 times higher. He noticed that doctors did something different, they performed autopsies and then went straight to the maternity ward. He realized the germs from the bodies were spreading to the mothers. This was in the 19th century and in 1857 he told his students they had to wash their hands to prevent the spread of the mysterious fever. Doctors resented the idea and Dr. Ignaz lost his job, went insane and was committed. Ask almost anyone who invented movable type and the answer will be Gutenberg, but that is really the wrong answer even though the history books will say the same thing. Movable type was invented about 400 years before by a little known Chinese citizen named Bi Sheng. He had to struggle with an alphabet containing thousands of characters, yet he struggled to make this become a reality. He used clay to create each letter and baked it in an oven to make it hard and fitted the letters into an iron frame. He would then paint an iron plate with ink and press it against the letters. He was then ready to print on paper. When radio became popular it wasn’t very good because of the static which accompanied the broadcasts. A man named Edwin Armstrong was able to invent a system which would give clear broadcasts and we call it FM radio today, but he had a problem trying to sell this in 1914. RCA or the Radio Corporation of America decided they didn’t want him to get the credit and launched all sorts of lawsuits against him and his discovery. He got crushed under the heavy financial burden of lawyer’s bills and it affected him to the point he may have destroyed his sanity. He committed suicide 40 years later. Sometimes an invention is discovered in our past which we still use today and don’t even know who to give the credit to. Such is the case of the flushing toilet. We tend to think of this as a more recent invention and yet archaeologists found flushing toilets in buildings built by the Minoans. I am talking about buildings built in 1800 B.C. We may never truly know when the first flying machine was created by, some people give credit to a Greek named Archytas in 428 B.C. Archytas created a bird like device which flew using compressed steam. It would be attached to a boiler where steam would flow into a hollow part and when the pressure became greater than the connection could stand it would fly away and according to some reports would fly for several hundred meters. This just might have been the first powered aircraft. I think some of the science fiction authors of the past hit the nail right on the head. Jules Verne was a genius and wrote about some things which came true such as the submarine and the race between armor and explosives. His submarine descriptions were so accurate it was as if he had been in a modern submarine and saw how they worked. Isaac Asimov was not only an author, but a professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He seemed to know the problem we were going to have with artificial intelligence and wrote the 3 laws of robotics which are still seen as the bible of robotics today. They are: The people I selected for this article were not on the whole the most famous, with a few exceptions. We all know about people like Tesla, Edison and the others, but there are so many more who never reached stardom who were ahead of their time.
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