Let’s Hear It For Unsung Heroes!

Hooray!

^{by Rob Kerby, Senior Editor}

Let's hear it for the unknown, unsung, unheralded good guys (and gals) out there! The world-changer who never got much recognition. He or she may have improved your life ... yet you've never heard of them! For example:

Alexander Parkes is the inventor of plastic. Just imagine the world today without his discovery. A good case can be made that the development of plastics took off with Charles Goodyear and that in the early 1900s, plastic-like Bakelite was developed by Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland. However, the first true modern plastic was patented by Parkes in Birmingham, England in 1856. It was unveiled at the 1862 Great International Exhibition in London as “parkesine” after its inventor and won him a bronze medal.

Hooray!

The Countess of Lovelace, Ada Byron King was the world’s first computer programmer. She was the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who left Byron shortly after Ada was born. She wished her daughter to be unlike her poet father and had Ada tutored in mathematics, logic and the sciences. In those years, there were no "professional" scientists and the participation of women in business, academics or the sciences was unacceptable. However, Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine, became Ada's lifelong friend. In 1835, Ada married the Earl of Lovelace, William King, ten years her senior, and became a Countess. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine, Babbage’s latest project. For nine months she worked feverishly on translating the memoir and included detailed notes of her own, recognizing the machine to be what we would call a general-purpose computer. She died of cancer in 1852 at the age of 37, but had the first algorithm ever processed by a machine, giving birth to the field of computer programming.

Hooray!

James Derham was born in 1757, a slave in Philadelphia. He overcame impossible odds to become America’s first known black physician. Back then, physicians were trained in apprenticeships. Derham’s first three masters were physicians who taught him to read and write as well as mix and administer medicines. Derham was sold to a British officer, and served as a doctor to soldiers of both sides. After the war, he became the property of a Scottish physician from New Orleans, who made him his medical assistant and pharmacist. In 1783, Derham bought his freedom and set up his own medical practice. Fluent in English, French and Spanish, he treated both black and white patients. A medical paper he wrote on his success in treating diphtheria caught the attention of Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Surgeon General of the Continental Army. Rush brought Derham back to Philadelphia in 1788 where he became an expert in throat diseases and in the relationship between weather and disease. When he returned to New Orleans in 1801, new city regulations required doctors to have a formal medical degree. He apparently retired at age 44. Nothing is known of his whereabouts after 1802.

Hooray!

Will Rogers was America’s first Cherokee Indian movie star and the highest-paid actor of his day. Born near Oologah, Oklahoma, he left home working in sideshows and vaudeville acts doing fancy cowboy lariat tricks and cracking jokes. He was recruited to New York City’s famed Ziegfeld Follies, which led to the movies. His syndicated newspaper column and radio programs just boosted his popularity. Through his writings and broadcasts, he entertained the world with his colorful, down-to-earth, first-hand accounts of his world travels. His folksy style allowed him to poke fun at anybody without causing offense – including gangsters, prohibition, politicians, government programs. ”I am not a member of an organized political party,” he declared. “I am a Democrat." He traveled around the world three times, made 71 movies – 50 silent, 21 "talkies" – wrote more than 4,000 nationally-syndicated newspaper columns and became the leading political wit of his time. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in Point Barrow, Alaska. Today, he is remembered with an elaborate memorial and museum in Claremore, Oklahoma, which he claimed as his hometown. He wrote his own epitaph, saying he wanted it carved on his tombstone, “I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like.”

Hooray!

U.S. Air Force Col. Larry Guarino was a senior prisoner of war in Vietnam. Fellow prisoners came home telling how he used tapped-out code on water pipes in his cell to send out morale-strengthening messages to his fellow prisoners. Several told later how they imagined him as some steely physical specimen, a real-life John Wayne and were stunned when he was taken out of his cell after 2,801 days in solitary, wasted away to 100 pounds with knees ballooned from prolonged forced kneeling on concrete floors and whose ankles and wrists were rust-colored from years of wearing shackles. During a heavy torture session when his head was forced between his ankles, Guarino reports, his only thought was: "Good Lord, I didn't know I could do tricks like this." During his 92 months of captivity he never lost faith or the will to endure. He came home to write A P.O.W.'s Story, a harrowing account of captivity in Hoa Lo prison, known sarcastically as the Hanoi Hilton by U.S. prisoners. His story captures a combination of bravery, resolve and humor that characterized the American prisoners, who hung in there purely out of sheer will and loyalty to one another – not wanting to let down their fellow prisoners, including Col. Guarino.

Hooray!

Nikola Tesla is the inventor of alternating current – without which there would be no electricity as we know it. Tesla essentially revolutionized how mankind functions, yet is largely forgotten. Born in Serbia, he came to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison. He disagreed with Edison on several issues – including whether the future was in direct current from batteries or alternating current. His alternating current induction motor and transformer were licensed by George Westinghouse, who supported Tesla’s experiments over the next years, including high- voltage, high-frequency power experiments that led to the invention of radio broadcasting. Although Tesla made a great deal of money from his patents, he lived his final days a recluse in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel. Over the years, Tesla gained a reputation as the stereotypical "mad scientist." In 1960, in honor of Tesla, the General Conference on Weights and Measures for the International System of Units dedicated the term "tesla" to a unit measuring magnetic field strength. In 1937, at a luncheon in his honor Tesla claimed to be working on plans for a directed-energy “death ray,” saying “it is not an experiment... I have built, demonstrated and used it. Only a little time will pass before I can give it to the world." He owned more than 500 patents. He loved publicity, but his inventions made his employers, not him, fabulously wealthy.

Hooray!

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen may have one of the greatest explorers who ever lived, but is relatively unknown except in his native Norway. Amundsen’s family says he was the first person to reach the South Pole, traverse the Northwest Passage and fly over the North Pole. The question of a Northwest Passage by sea, north of Canada, had been sought for centuries. In 1903, Amundsen led the first sailing expedition to traverse between the Atlantic and Pacific in a small fishing vessel, the Gjøa outfitted with a then-revolutionary gasoline engine. Eight years later on December 14, 1911, Amundsen and five teammates arrived at the South Pole 33-34 days before English explorer Robert Scott. In 1926, Amundsen and 15 others made the first crossing of the North Pole in a dirigible – a rigid-frame blimp. Three previous claims to have arrived at the North Pole by Frederick Cook in 1908, Robert Peary in 1909 and Richard E. Byrd in 1926 are still disputed. In any case Amundsen was the first to reach both the North and South Poles.