They Changed Their World and Ours 7 Quiz

Answer: Karl Benz

Karl Friedrich Benz (1844-1929) was born in Muhlburg, which is now a Karlsruhe borough in contemporary Germany. His father, Johann Georg Benz, was a locomotive engineer who died because of pneumonia when Karl Benz was only two years old; nevertheless, perhaps Benz's mechanical mind and interests were part of an inheritance from his father. Karl Benz, a prodigy, did quite well in school and, following his father's interest in locomotive engineering, he enrolled at the University of Karlsruhe at the age of fifteen to pursue studies in mechanical engineering. While attending classes over the next four years, he frequently rode his bicycle, and while pedaling his way around campus and the town, he began to imagine the possibility of a horseless and self-propelled carriage.

At the age of twenty-seven, Benz and a partner began the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop in Mannheim, but after a year, Benz's fiance Bertha Ringer bought out the partner's interest in the industry, and the couple began the Factory for Machines for Sheet-metal Working. At this time, Benz invented a series of items that illustrated his genius: a petroleum-operated two-stroke engine, the spark plug, a battery-operated ignition, a speed regulator, the carburetor, the clutch, the manually operated gear shift, and the radiator. (Wow!) Benz now owned so many patents and was making so much money that he was able in his spare time to chase and realize his dream of a horseless carriage. Eventually, he put together the Benz Patent Motorwagen that relied on his own four-stroke engine.

His wife, Bertha, has her own important role in this story. Without telling her husband of her plan, she and their two sons hopped into a Motorwagen and drove it sixty-six miles to visit her mother. She made several stops along the way to refuel, but more importantly, after several rough moments of trying to slow the vehicle while driving down slopes in the road, she came up with the idea of brake linings and had a shoemaker attach leather to the brake pads. Of course, the most significant result of her journey is that she was able to convince Karl that his horseless carriage was not just a novelty but a useful and practical car that could be sold and used for long-distance traveling.

By 1890, Benz was manufacturing and selling four-wheeled motorcars, and in 1926, the Benz company merged with Gottlieb Daimler's Mercedes company. Finally, Mercedes-Benz began the manufacturing of true luxury cars that could be sold for high prices.

Answer: Susan B. Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906) was born in Adams, Massachusetts, into a family of Quakers who considered it their duty to be involved in various movements for social reform, particularly the abolitionist movement. In fact, her brother Merritt fought with John Brown against the pro-slavery forces in the Bleeding Kansas events. At the age of seventeen, Susan Anthony was collecting petitions for the abolition of slavery, and at the age of thirty-six, she was the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. She and her family were also members of the temperance movement to limit or completely halt the production and sale of alcoholic beverages and spirits. While attempting to speak at a temperance convention, however, she was denied any opportunity to do so for no other reason than that she was a woman. Thus, the fire for women's rights was lit in her soul. She recognized that until women were granted the right to vote, they would never be taken seriously in a society dominated by men.

In 1851, Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and they established a life-long friendship as well as a decades-long partnership for their fight for social reform in the United States. In 1852, they founded the New York State Women's Temperance Society; in 1863, the Women's Loyal National League, an anti-slavery organization; in 1866, the American Equal Rights Association, a suffragist movement for both females and African Americans; and in 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association. Then, in 1890, the NWSA merged with the American Woman Suffrage Association and became the National American Woman Suffrage Association with Anthony at its head. Later, she even played a key role in the creation of the International Council of Women.

Despite a great number of people criticizing Anthony as unwomanly and immoral, she traveled throughout the United States delivering as many as 75-100 speeches a year and working on several state-sponsored campaigns. However, her vociferous demands for equal rights were not only delivered through public speaking but also through writing. She and Stanton created "The Revolution", a women's rights newspaper, in 1868. Furthermore, she, Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage began the project of writing the six-volume "History of Woman Suffrage" in 1876.

In 1872, Anthony was arrested for voting illegally in the Presidential election. In a very highly publicized trial she was convicted and fined $100. However, she refused to pay it, hoping that she would be imprisoned, drawing more publicity to her cause. Unfortunately, the judge refused to enforce the collection of the fine as he understood her strategy and worried that a continued fight might lead to an appeal that ended at the Supreme Court with that body initiating the legal justification of a woman's right to vote.

At the time of Anthony's death at the age of 86, the United States had still not legally recognized women as having the right to vote. However, even at her death, Anthony continued to be confident, saying, "Failure is impossible". In 1920, which was fourteen years after Anthony's death, the United States Congress ratified the nineteenth amendment, recognizing women's right to vote. Colloquially, the amendment was referred to as "The Susan B. Anthony Amendment".

Answer: Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great (1729-1796), or Catherine II, was born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, and she became Empress of Russia after a successful coup against her own husband Tsar Peter III. She had him arrested and forced him to sign a letter of abdication. While he was still captive, he was assassinated by a coup sympathizer Alexei Orlov. Whether Catherine was involved in the assassination is not clear. (Catherine changed her name from Sophie to Ekaterina following her conversion from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodox).

Catherine the Great remains Russia's longest ruling female leader, having reigned from 1762 until her death in 1796. She collapsed from a stroke, some say while on her toilet, and never regained consciousness. During her reign, she transformed Russia into a much bigger, stronger, and wealthier country recognized by other European nations as a significant and influential world power. Under her direction, Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire to claim control of the Crimea and then battled Persia to take control of areas occupied by current-day Georgia and Azerbaijan. Thus, Russia had control of the Azov and Black Seas. She also took control in the west of land currently occupied by Lithuania and Poland and spread the Russian empire further east into Alaska in North America. She personally led to the foundation of many new towns and cities throughout the vast land Russia controlled, and spurred a renaissance of sorts. She ushered into her country a new interest in education, science, art, literature, music, philosophy, and many other elements of culture, much of which was influenced by Western tradition. Voltaire was apparently a primary influence in her life. However, she was never very successful with democratic reform of her country, and Russia's society and economy were run primarily through the labor of millions of serfs, who often revolted.

Of course, Catherine is also remembered for her promiscuity, having had a great number of lovers over the course of her life from her youth until her old age. One of them, Stanislaus Poniatowsky, would often slip into her room disguised as a footman, and his attentions were well rewarded as he was made king of Poland--for a while, anyway. She also had illegitimate children, one of whom took the throne for a short while following her death until he, too, was assassinated. Many rumors about her sexuality persist to this day, including the lie that she had sexual intercourse with a horse.

Answer: Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was born in Birstall of Yorkshire, England, to a family of Dissenters, individuals of the Protestant faith who rejected the Church of England. During his early adolescence, Priestley became gravely ill, and, convinced he was dying, he began wrestling arduously with the question of his spiritual salvation. Under great anxiety about the destination of his soul, he rejected the Calvinist teaching of God's election of only a select few souls for the idea of universal salvation. His thinking continued to grow more radical as he matured, and he began to advocate toleration for all religious and philosophical ideas. He believed that truth would be achieved only when all ideas were allowed to be freely and openly discussed. It was this approach to thought and understanding that led him to explore a merger of theism and materialism, to support equal rights for religious dissenters, to help found the Unitarian Church, and to support the cause of the French Revolutionaries. However, his radical nature also led to his being run out of England. In 1791, Priestley's home, laboratory, and church were burned by a mob of angry citizens, and he eventually settled in Pennsylvania in the United States.

Of course, Priestly is mostly celebrated for his scientific experimentation and discovery. He invented soda water or seltzer and performed a number of valuable experiments with electricity, which he wrote about and published. However, he is most famous for launching modern chemistry through his discovery of ten new "airs", as he called them--most notably oxygen. He discovered that, if mercuric oxide were heated, it gave off a colorless gas he referred to as "dephlogisticated air". Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier later repeated Priestley's experiment and gave this "air" the name of "oxygen". He is also recognized for his writings on grammar and history, and his works on metaphysics were influential on the later establishment of utilitarianism.

In the United States, Priestley was befriended by both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both so greatly admired him that some time after his death, Adams remarked to Jefferson, "Oh, that Priestley could live again!"

Answer: Max Planck

Max Planck (1858-1947) was named Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck at birth, but by the time he was ten years old, he was signing his name "Max Planck". Most had called him "Marx", but he eventually chose "Max" for himself. Planck became one of the most significant theoretical physicists (those who use mathematics and abstractions rather than physical experimentation to explain physical phenomena) of the twentieth century. However, he possibly could have never been such an important individual in this field. While a youth in Munich, his physics instructor at the Maximilian Gymnasium (school) tried to persuade him not to pursue studies in physics because the instructor believed there was nothing else really left to explore in this science.

In addition to his contributions to the study of thermodynamics (for example, his 1897 publication of "Treatise on Thermodynamics"), he is given credit as the originator of the quantum theory. Planck pondered the electromagnetic radiation emitted by black bodies (objects that absorb all light that strikes them so that no light is reflected and, thus, they appear black). Rather than mapping out his thought processes, I will simply state that he eventually concluded that electromagnetic energy was emitted from a black body (or any source, really) only in quantized form, which means that energy is emitted in degrees with each successive increasing degree being a different multiple of one basic unit. This basic unit came to be known as Planck's Constant, which is now central to quantum mechanics.

Max Planck apparently remained a religious-minded individual all of his life though he was most likely a deist, at least in his latter years. Interestingly, during a speech he delivered in 1944 in Florence, Italy, he said, "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter".

Answer: Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney (1765-1825) played a pivotal role in the evolution of the United States, and it is most interesting to ponder what the United States would be had he not existed or had he chosen different routes in the journey of his life. After he attended Yale on money he himself earned and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, his goal was to study law. However, as he had exhausted much of his savings, he decided to work as a tutor in South Carolina instead. He set sail, and as fate would have it, he met the widow of General Nathanael Greene, who convinced him to visit her plantation in Georgia. Accepting her invitation, he met her plantation manager and suitor Phineas Miller, and the two eventually went into business together. This partnership set Whitney on the path to creating his famous cotton gin in 1793 and to his eventual strategy for efficient manufacturing, interchangeable parts.

It's plausible to make an argument, that Whitney is oddly partly responsible not only for the event of the Civil War but also for its eventual outcome--a victory for the United States of America. Consider the following. Whitney's cotton gin so revolutionized the manner in which cotton was harvested that the South's cotton industry exploded, leading sequentially to a much increased vitality to the practice of slavery. Southern states then eventually seceded from the United States and went to war to defend their way of life, which was highly dependent now on slavery. Meanwhile, the Northern states, what remained of the Union, had experienced a monumental explosion in its manufacturing industries because of Whitney's idea about interchangeable parts, an idea he first put into practice in his rifle factory, which incidentally profited due to its sale of weapons to the United States Army. Thus, not only had the Northern states become a powerful manufacturing entity due to Whitney's strategies for production, but their armies were much more readily equipped with the fruits of all of that manufacturing--aspects that led to the North's victory over the South. Of course, Whitney was long dead before the Civil War started, but his influence had a tremendous effect on the evolution of the United States of America. I do understand that the origins of wars and their outcomes are much more complex than what I am suggesting here. I'm just positing that Eli Whitney is a much more important human being than simply "the inventor of the cotton gin," which is all we seem to learn about him from school.

Answer: Lech Walesa

Lech Walesa was born in Popowo, Poland, in 1943, during the time of German occupation in World War II. His father was sent to a German labor camp, and after the war, he returned home only to die of exhaustion two months later. Walesa's personality and determination were shaped by his mother.

While working at the Lenin Shipyard, now known as the Gdansk Shipyard, he became distressed by the harsh and unfair treatment of the workers there. He helped organize and lead protests and was eventually chosen as chairman of the strike committee. His strikes led to the deaths of thirty fellow workers; however, these sacrifices only strengthened his resolve to fight harder. He was subsequently fired from the shipyard, and over the course of several continued peaceful strikes and protests, he was arrested numerous times. In 1980, he helped establish the Gdansk Agreement with the Communist Polish government and then helped found and lead the Solidarity trade-union movement, which led to strikes and protests all over Poland. In 1983, he was encouraged to continue after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. He was persecuted by the Communist government, martial law was established, and Solidarity was outlawed. Still, Walesa did not surrender and again he was placed in prison. After his release, he continued his activism, which culminated in the re-establishment of parliamentary elections and an election for president. Running for the office of President himself, he was elected in 1990.

Of course, other countries of the Soviet bloc and countries that had been annexed by the Soviet Union were inspired by Walesa's successes and tenacity. Changes began to occur and walls began to fall.

Interestingly, Bono of the Irish band U2 wrote one of the band's earliest hits "New Year's Day" after being inspired by Lech Walesa's actions.

Answer: Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio, or Andrea Di Pietro della Gondola (1508-1580) was born in Padova (Padua), Italy, and became a very prolific architect in the Republic of Venice, as the region of Italy was once called. All the buildings he himself was responsible for constructing are located in the Venetian Province; however, his publication of "The Four Books of Architecture" in 1570 had such a wide range of influence that he has become historically one of the most significant architects of the world. Heavily influenced himself by Roman and Greek principles of architecture, Palladio developed a supremely rational and orderly approach to design that has spanned four and a half centuries and spread throughout Europe and North and South America. Given his tremendous impact, it's inspirational to consider that this son of a miller began as a simple stonecutter and bricklayer.

Gian Giorgio Trissino, a wealthy man and the leading intellectual in Vicenza at the time, hired Palladio to build and remodel. He was highly impressed with Palladio's work and took an interest in his further education. He introduced Palladio to Vitruvius, the famous Roman architect and engineer, and instilled in Palladio a greater love for art, science, and classical literature. Trissino is also the one who gave Palladio his artist's name.

Palladio began in earnest to develop his own style in the late 1530s and '40s, a style that came to be known as "Palladian," just like the windows referred to and used as a hint in the question. His palladian villas and palaces can be observed in Italy, of course, but also famously in the Loire Valley of France. In Great Britain, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren were highly influenced by Palladio's style. In 2010, the One Hundred Eleventh Congress of the United States officially named Palladio "The Father of American Architecture".

Answer: Maimonides

Maimonides, or Moses ben Maimon, (ca.1135-1204) was a Sephardic Jew, meaning his Jewish ethnicity was of the community of Jews from the Iberian peninsula. When Berber Muslims conquered Córdoba in 1148, Jews and Christians alike faced the ultimatum of "convert to Islam or die". He and his family chose exile and began a wandering life for quite some time; they traveled throughout present-day southern Spain, Morocco, and Palestine before settling in Egypt. Maimonides and his brother David had become jewel merchants. David became convinced that great wealth could be achieved through trade with India, so, despite Maimonides' pleading with him not to go, David set sail. Unfortunately, he died at sea. Stricken with great grief, Maimonides eventually turned toward a different lifestyle.

Sometime around 1171, Maimonides was appointed by Saladin to the office of Nagid, which meant he was now the official leader over all the Jews currently living in Egypt. Maimonides had studied medicine in Córdoba as well as in Fez in Morocco, so it was not long before he became the appointed court physician as well. Most of the rest of his life was spent busily caring for the ill, ministering to others as a rabbi, and writing medical, philosophical, and religious texts.

Maimonides' fourteen-volume "Mishneh Torah" is still considered one of the central and most authoritative collection of Orthodox Jewish law and ethics. His thoughts had a tremendous impact on metaphysics and ethics, not only in Judaism but in Christianity and Islam as well. His explanation of God is of a being who is Necessary, thus contributing to the cosmological argument of God's existence as the Primary Cause of all things. He also argued that evil does not exist but rather it is the absence of good. Furthermore, those who argue that evil seems greater than good because it is greater than the good we see on earth are limited in their vision and understanding; humans are not as significant as we think we are in the mind of God but are only a small part of God's greater creation of the Universe and beyond.

The act of giving is considered essential to Maimonides' explanation of ethics. Ultimately, the greatest form of giving is that done by the giver who expects no reward, not even a heavenly one. The worst form of charity to him was money or any other gift given grudgingly or with strings attached. He also advocated that the greatest gift one could give the poor was teach them a trade.

Answer: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) studied law at Leipzig University and established his own practice in 1771. However, more interested in literary pursuits, he published his first novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" in 1774, which was such a tremendous success that Goethe was a celebrity at the age of twenty-five. He then became a leading figure in the proto-Romantic literary movement called "Sturm und Drang" ("storm and stress"). He then caught the attention of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Carl August, in 1782, was given a noble title, and was appointed a member of the Duke's privy council. He then began to sit on war and highway commissions, helped re-open silver mines, reformed a university, and rebuilt Weimar's botanical park.

Over the course of his life, he published four novels--"The Sorrows of Young Werther", "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship", "Elective Affinities", and "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants"--a great number of both lyric and epic poetry--"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (yes, the one made famous by Dukas and Disney) and "Hermann and Dorothea" being two of the greatest--and several prose and verse dramas--with "Faust" being considered one of the greatest pieces of world literature. He also wrote memoirs and an autobiography as well as literary and aesthetic criticism and over 10,000 letters. Then there are the contributions to science he made with his treatises on botany, anatomy, and color, such as his "Metamorphosis of Plants" in 1790 and "Theory of Colours" in 1810.