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des Sciences’ selection of the most important works of the age. A 1698 composite perspective of the scientific and technological work in progress at the Académie Royale des Sciences, in Paris, France. Mathematics, physics, and astronomy are heavily emphasized.

Figure 12.4. Frontispiece from Francis Bacon’s 1620 Instauratio Magna. This classic engraving from Francis Bacon’s 1620 “Great Restoration” of knowledge through the new instrument of science is symbolic of what mattered in history—knowledge and the courage to use it to sail from the known into the unknown. The ships represent the tools of scientific knowledge that carry the explorers (scientists) past the Pillars of Hercules (literally, the Straits of Gibraltar), separating the known (the Mediterranean) from the unknown (the Atlantic).

1. Muhammad

2. Newton

3. Christ

4. Buddha

5. Confucius

6. Saint Paul

7. Ts’ai Lun

8. Gutenberg

9. Columbus

10. Einstein

To the bottom ten:

91. Peter the Great

92. Mencius

93. Dalton

94. Homer

95. Elizabeth I

96. Justinian

97. Kepler

98. Picasso

99. Mahavira

100. Bohr

In response to Hart’s list of mostly white males, Columbus Salley wrote The Black 100, which includes an importance ranking from the top ten:

1. Martin Luther King

2. Frederick Douglass

3. Booker T. Washington

4. W. E. B. DuBois

5. Charles H. Houston

6. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones

7. Prince Hall

8. Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm

9. David Walker

10. Nat Turner

To the bottom ten:

91. Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis

92. Harry Belafonte

93. Marian Wright Edelman

94. Marian Anderson

95. Colin Powell

96. Doug Wilder

97. Ron Brown

98. Clarence Thomas

99. Black Power

100. Rosa Parks

The Wall Street Journal in 1982 published the results of a ranking of the ten most important developments in all history, as selected by a group of 350 research and development executives. This group came up with:

1. Wheel

2. Bow and arrow

3. Telegraph

4. Electric light

5. Plow

6. Steam engine

7. Vaccine

8. Telephone

9. Paper

10. Flush toilet

Lists, rankings, and comparisons of this nature are a pastime for many thinkers. Even renowned scholars have occasionally dabbled in such trivialities. Hannah Arendt, for example, in The Human Condition, opens a chapter with the following rather bold statement: “Three great events stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character: the discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole earth; the Reformation; the telescope and the development of a new science that considers the nature of the earth from the viewpoint of the universe.”

Mortimer J. Adler made his reputation, in part, as editor of the Great Books of the Western World, a fifty-four-volume set (read list) of the greatest authors in history. Furthermore, included with this set is the Syntopicon, a listing of the 102 (no more, no less) greatest ideas in history, and what each of the great authors had to say about any or all of them. From this project Adler has spun off several other “list” books, including the Six Great Ideas (Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Liberty, Equality, Justice).

Similarly, Jacob Bronowski listed the significant developments in the “ascent of man,” in his book of the same title. His thirteen chapters are really a chronological directory of the thirteen great ideas in human cultural evolution. Bronowski’s well-thought-out docket, summarized from each chapter, included:

1. Domestication of plants and animals

2. Jericho, the wheel, the horse

3. Architecture and the arch

4. Widespread use of the metals copper, bronze, and iron

5. Mathematics

6. Telescope, heliocentrism, scientific method

7. Theories of gravity and relativity

8. Steam engine/industrial revolution

9. Theory of evolution

10. The table of chemical elements/atomic structure

11. Gaussian statistics, Heisenberg uncertainty principle

12. Mendelian genetics, DNA