By Ian | 4 March, 2013
An odd thought went through my mind: Who are the greatest change agents of the last 300 years who have changed the lives of 1 billion people (1,000,000,000)?
One springs to mind:
- TimBL (Sir Timothy Berners-Lee) for the internet URL system and the easy access to information, doing services
But we also have indirect changers like Wilhelm Röntgen who, without his apparatus, a lot of people would die or be incapacitated. Alexander Fleming / Howard Walter Florey / Ernst Chain / Norman Heatley who found penicillin and made a medicine out of it. Norman Borlaug and others who improved the yield of wheat, thus saving billions from hunger.
Another question which pops up for me is - can somebody who sits on the wave of change be called a change agent? An example hier is Bill Gates. You could say that Windows changed the lives of billions. But the PC was already available, an operating system (CP/M) was already available, graphical interfaces had been developed at Xerox and were available on unix like systems. The wave of change was forseeable. Bill Gates just surfed on this change and used it for his best advantage.
Can nice products be accredited to “change”? An example here is Facebook, which has over 1 G of users.
Other topics which could also have had such a large influence are Glasnost, Marxism, Hollywood / Bollywood, Music, Telephone, TV, British Empire.
The list would probably be pretty long and the border between direct and indirect change flowing.