Mother teresa
Mother
Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), Roman Catholic nun, founder of the
Missionaries of Charity. For her humanitarian work she won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1979.
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born to
Albanian parents in Skopje, which at the time was under the rule of the Ottoman
Empire. (The city is now the capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia.) At the age of 18, she entered the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady
of Loreto in Ireland. She trained in Dublin and in Darjiling (Darjeeling),
India, before taking her religious vows in 1937. She took the name Teresa from
Saint Teresa of Lisieux, the patron saint of foreign missionaries. While serving
as principal of a Roman Catholic high school in Calcutta, Mother Teresa was
moved by the presence of the sick and dying on the city's streets. In 1948 she
was granted permission to leave her post at the convent and begin a ministry
among the sick.
In 1950 Mother Teresa and her
associates were approved within the archdiocese of Calcutta as the Missionaries
of Charity. The order was later recognized as a pontifical congregation under
the jurisdiction of Rome. Members of the congregation take four vows on
acceptance by the religious community. In addition to the three basic vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience, a fourth vow is required pledging service to
the poor, whom Mother Teresa described as the embodiment of Christ.
In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the
Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta. She eventually
extended her work to many other parts of the world. In recognition of her
efforts, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She was forced
to scale back her activities in 1990 because of declining health. Mother Teresa:
In My Own Words, a collection of her anecdotes and quotations, was published in
1996. In 1997, because of Mother Teresa's poor health, Sister Nirmala was chosen
to succeed her as leader of the Missionaries of Charity. Later that year, Mother
Teresa passed away. People around the world mourned her death.
Mahatma gandhI
Gandhi,
Mohandas Karamchand
(1869-1948), Indian nationalist leader, who established his country's freedom
through a nonviolent revolution.
Gandhi, also known as Mahatma
Gandhi, was born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarat on October 2,
1869, and educated in law at University College, London. In 1891, after having
been admitted to the British bar, Gandhi returned to India and attempted to
establish a law practice in Bombay (now Mumbai), with little success. Two years
later an Indian firm with interests in South Africa retained him as legal
adviser in its office in Durban. Arriving in Durban, Gandhi found himself
treated as a member of an inferior race. He was appalled at the widespread
denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants to South
Africa. He threw himself into the struggle for elementary rights for Indians.
Passive
Resistance
Gandhi remained in South
Africa for 20 years, suffering imprisonment many times. In 1896, after being
attacked and beaten by white South Africans, Gandhi began to teach a policy of
passive resistance to, and noncooperation with, the South African authorities.
Part of the inspiration for this policy came from the Russian writer Loe
Tolstoy, whose influence on Gandhi was profound. Gandhi also acknowledged his
debt to the teachings of Christ and to the 19th-century American writer Henry
David Throreau, especially to Thoreau's famous essay "Civil
Disobedience." Gandhi considered the terms passive resistance and civil
disobedience inadequate for his purposes, however, and coined another term,
Satyagraha (Sanskrit, "truth and firmness"). During the Boer War,
Gandhi organized an ambulance corps for the British army and commanded a Red
Cross unit. After the war he returned to his campaign for Indian rights. In
1910, he founded Tolstoy Farm, near Johannesburg, a cooperative colony for
Indians. In 1914 the government of the Union of South Africa made important
concessions to Ghandhi's demands, including recognition of Indian marriages and
abolition of the poll tax for them. His work in South Africa complete, he
returned to India.
Campaign for Home Rule
Gandhi
became a leader in a complex struggle, the Indian campaign for home rule.
Following World War I, in which he played an active part in recruiting
campaigns, Gandhi, again advocating Satyagraha, launched his movement of passive
resistance to Britain. When, in 1919, Parliament passed the Rowlatt Acts, giving
the Indian colonial authorities emergency powers to deal with so-called
revolutionary activities, Satyagraha spread through India, gaining millions of
followers. A demonstration against the Rowlatt Acts resulted in a massacre of
Indians at Amritsar by British soldiers; in 1920, when the British government
failed to make amends, Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of noncooperation.
Indians in public office resigned, government agencies such as courts of law
were boycotted, and Indian children were withdrawn from government schools.
Through India, streets were blocked by squatting Indians who refused to rise
even when beaten by police. Gandhi was arrested, but the British were soon
forced to release him.
Economic independence for
India, involving the complete boycott of British goods, was made a corollary of
Gandhi's swaraj (Sanskrit, "self-ruling") movement. The economic
aspects of the movement were significant, for the exploitation of Indian
villagers by British industrialists had resulted in extreme poverty in the
country and the virtual destruction of Indian home industries. As a remedy for
such poverty, Gandhi advocated revival of cottage industries; he began to use a
spinning wheel as a token of the return to the simple village life he preached,
and of the renewal of native Indian industries.
Gandhi became the
international symbol of a free India. He lived a spiritual and ascetic life of
prayer, fasting, and meditation. His union with his wife became, as he himself
stated, that of brother and sister. Refusing earthly possessions, he wore the
loincloth and shawl of the lowliest Indian and subsisted on vegetables, fruit
juices, and goat's milk. Indians revered him as a saint and began to call him
Mahatma (Sanskrit, "great soul"), a title reserved for the greatest
sages. Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Sanskrit, "noninjury"),
was the expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By the
Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Britain too would eventually
consider violence useless and would leave India.
The Mahatma's political and
spiritual hold on India was so great that the British authorities dared not
interfere with him. In 1921 the Indian National Congress, the group that
spearheaded the movement for nationhood, gave Gandhi complete executive
authority, with the right of naming his own successor. The Indian population,
however, could not fully comprehend the unworldly ahimsa. A series of armed
revolts against Britain broke out, culminating in such violence that Gandhi
confessed the failure of the civil-disobedience campaign he had called, and
ended it. The British government again seized and imprisoned him in 1922.
After his release from prison
in 1924, Gandhi withdrew from active politics and devoted himself to propagating
communal unity. Unavoidably, however, he was again drawn into the vortex of the
struggle for independence. In 1930 the Mahatma proclaimed a new campaign of
civil disobedience, calling upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes,
particularly the tax on salt. The campaign was a march to the sea, in which
thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from Ahmadabad to the Arabian Sea, where
they made salt by evaporating sea water. Once more the Indian leader was
arrested, but he was released in 1931, halting the campaign after the British
made concessions to his demands. In the same year Gandhi represented the Indian
National Congress at a conference in London.
Attack
upon the caste system
In 1932, Gandhi began new
civil-disobedience campaigns against the British. Arrested twice, the Mahatma
fasted for long periods several times; these fasts were effective measures
against the British, because revolution might well have broken out in India if
he had died. In September 1932, while in jail, Gandhi undertook a "fast
unto death" to improve the status of the Hindu Untouchables. The British,
by permitting the Untouchables to be considered as a separate part of the Indian
electorate, were, according to Gandhi, countenancing an injustice. Although he
was himself a member of the Vaisya (merchant) caste, Gandhi was the great leader
of the movement in India dedicated to eradicating the unjust social and economic
aspects of the caste system.
In 1934 Gandhi formally
resigned from politics, being replaced as leader of the Congress Party by
Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi traveled through India, teaching ahimsa and demanding
eradication of "untouchability." The esteem in which he was held was
the measure of his political power. So great was this power that the limited
home rule granted by the British in 1935 could not be implemented until Gandhi
approved it. A few years later, in 1939, he again returned to active political
life because of the pending federation of Indian principalities with the rest of
India. His first act was a fast, designed to force the ruler of the state of
Rajkot to modify his autocratic rule. Public unrest caused by the fast was so
great that the colonial government intervened; the demands were granted. The
Mahatma again became the most important political figure in India.
Independence
When World War II broke out,
the Congress Party and Gandhi demanded a declaration of war aims and their
application to India. As a reaction to the unsatisfactory response from the
British, the party decided not to support Britain in the war unless the country
were granted complete and immediate independence. The British refused, offering
compromises that were rejected. When Japan entered the war, Gandhi still refused
to agree to Indian participation. He was interned in 1942 but was released two
years later because of failing health.
By 1944 the Indian struggle
for independence was in its final stages, the British government having agreed
to independence on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the
Muslim league and the Congress Party, should resolve their differences. Gandhi
stood steadfastly against the partition of India but ultimately had to agree, in
the hope that internal peace would be achieved after the Muslim demand for
separation had been satisfied. India and Pakistan became separate states when
the British granted India its independence in 1947. During the riots that
followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live
together peacefully. Riots engulfed Calcutta, one of the largest cities in
India, and the Mahatma fasted until disturbances ceased. On January 13, 1948, he
undertook another successful fast in New Delhi to bring about peace. But on
January 30, 12 days after the termination of that fast, as he was on his way to
his evening prayer meeting, he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu
fanatic.
Gandhi's death was regarded
as an international catastrophe. His place in humanity was measured not in terms
of the 20th century but in terms of history. A period of mourning was set aside
in the United Nations General Assembly, and condolences to India were expressed
by all countries. Religious violence soon waned in India and Pakistan, and the
teachings of Gandhi came to inspire nonviolent movements elsewhere, notably in
the U.S. under the civil rights leader
Martin Luther king
King,
Martin Luther, Jr.
(1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal
leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of
nonviolent protest. King's challenges to segregation and racial discrimination
in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to support the cause
of civil rights in the United States. After his assassination in 1968, King
became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.
Education and Early Life
Martin
Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther
King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as
pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s maternal grandfather. King, Jr. was ordained as a
Baptist minister at age 18.
King attended local
segregated public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse
College at age 15 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1948.
After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in
1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in
systematic theology in 1955.
King's public-speaking
abilities?which would become renowned as his stature grew in the civil rights
movement?developed slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place
prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs
in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his
third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful
impression he made in public speeches and discussions.
Throughout his education,
King was exposed to influences that related Christian theology to the struggles
of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied
the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also
read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against
American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and a leader in the
national community of racially liberal clergymen, was especially important in
shaping King's theological development.
While in Boston, King met
Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in 1953
and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a church with a
well-educated congregation that had recently been led by a minister who had
protested against segregation.
The
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Montgomery's
black community had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on
city buses. Many white bus drivers treated blacks rudely, often cursing them and
humiliating them by enforcing the city's segregation laws, which forced black
riders to sit in the back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers
on crowded buses. By the early 1950s Montgomery's blacks had discussed
boycotting the buses in an effort to gain better treatment?but not necessarily
to end segregation.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa
Parks, a leading member of the local branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was ordered by a bus driver to give up
her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, she was arrested and taken to
jail. Local leaders of the NAACP, especially Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the
arrest of the popular and highly respected Parks was the event that could rally
local blacks to a bus protest.
Nixon also believed that a
citywide protest should be led by someone who could unify the community. Unlike
Nixon and other leaders in Montgomery's black community, the recently arrived
King had no enemies. Furthermore, Nixon saw King's public-speaking gifts as
great assets in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King was soon
chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the
organization that directed the bus boycott.
The Montgomery bus boycott
lasted for more than a year, demonstrating a new spirit of protest among
Southern blacks. King's serious demeanor and consistent appeal to Christian
brotherhood and American idealism made a positive impression on whites outside
the South. Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the bombing
of King's home, focused media attention on Montgomery. In February 1956 an
attorney for the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction
against Montgomery's segregated seating practices. The federal court ruled in
favor of the MIA, ordering the city's buses to be desegregated, but the city
government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. By the time
the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a
national figure. His memoir of the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958),
provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further extended King's
national influence.
Civil
Rights Leadership
In
1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership (SCLC), an organization
of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As
SCLC's president, King became the organization's dominant personality and its
primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the
organization's fund-raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with
preaching engagements in Northern churches.
SCLC sought to complement the
NAACP's legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with King and
other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to protest
discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts.
The violent responses that direct action provoked from some whites eventually
forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in
the South.
King made strategic alliances
with Northern whites that would bolster his success at influencing public
opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and
peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them
Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King's closest adviser at
times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American
Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant
ministers in the North, with whom he shared theological and moral views.
In 1959 King visited India
and worked out more clearly his understanding of Satyagraha, Gandhi's principle
of nonviolent persuasion, which King had determined to use as his main
instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in
Montgomery to become co-pastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church
in Atlanta.
SCLC
Protest Campaigns
In
the early 1960s King led SCLC in a series of protest campaigns that gained
national attention. The first was in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where SCLC joined
local demonstrations against segregated restaurants, hotels, transit, and
housing. SCLC increased the size of the demonstrations in an effort to create so
much dissent and disorder that local white officials would be forced to end
segregation to restore normal business relations. The strategy did not work in
Albany. During months of protests, Albany's police chief jailed hundreds of
demonstrators without visible police violence. Eventually the protesters'
energy, and the money to bail out protesters, ran out.
The strategy did work,
however, in Birmingham, Alabama, when SCLC joined a local protest during the
spring of 1963. The protest was led by SCLC member Fred Shuttlesworth, one of
the ministers who had worked with King in 1957 in organizing SCLC. Shuttlesworth
believed that the Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene "Bull"
Connor, would meet protesters with violence. In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff
escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and
school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of
downtown Birmingham, angering Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs
and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. Scenes of
young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by torrents
of water from fire hoses were shown in newspapers and on televisions around the
world.
During the demonstrations,
King was arrested and sent to jail. He wrote a letter from his jail cell to
local clergymen who had criticized him for creating disorder in the city. His
"Letter from Birmingham City Jail," which argued that individuals had
the moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at
the time and added to King's standing as a moral leader.
National reaction to the
Birmingham violence built support for the struggle for black civil rights. The
demonstrations forced white leaders to negotiate an end to some forms of
segregation in Birmingham. Even more important, the protests encouraged many
Americans to support national legislation against segregation.
I
Have a Dream
King
and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive
protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. On August 28, 1963, King
delivered a stirring address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights
supporters. His "I Have a Dream" speech expressed the hopes of the
civil rights movement in oratory as moving as any in American history: "I
have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning
of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal.'... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a
nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the
content of their character."
The speech and the march
built on the Birmingham demonstrations to create the political momentum that
resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public
accommodations, as well as discrimination in education and employment. As a
result of King's effectiveness as a leader of the American civil rights movement
and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for
peace.
Selma
Marches
In
1965 SCLC joined a voting-rights protest march that was planned to go from
Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi)
away. The goal of the march was to draw national attention to the struggle for
black voting rights in the state. Police beat and tear-gassed the marchers just
outside of Selma, and televised scenes of the violence, on a day that came to be
known as Bloody Sunday, resulted in an outpouring of support to continue the
march. SCLC petitioned for and received a federal court order barring police
from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery. Two weeks after Bloody
Sunday, more than 3000 people, including a core of 300 marchers who would make
the entire trip, set out toward Montgomery. They arrived in Montgomery five days
later, where King addressed a rally of more than 20,000 people in front of the
capitol building.
The march created support for
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in
August. The act suspended (and amendments to the act later banned) the use of
literacy tests and other voter qualification tests that often had been used to
prevent blacks from registering to vote.
After the Selma protests,
King had fewer dramatic successes in his struggle for black civil rights. Many
white Americans who had supported his work believed that the job was done. In
many ways, the nation's appetite for civil rights progress had been filled. King
also lost support among white Americans when he joined the growing number of
antiwar activists in 1965 and began to criticize publicly American foreign
policy in Vietnam. King's outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (1959-1975)
also angered President Johnson. On the other hand, some of King's white
supporters agreed with his criticisms of United States involvement in Vietnam so
strongly that they shifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar
movement.
Black Power
By
the mid-1960s King's role as the unchallenged leader of the civil rights
movement was questioned by many younger blacks. Activists such as Stokely
Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that
King's nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless
in the face of sustained violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership
of ministers. In addition, many SNCC organizers resented King, feeling that
often they had put in the hard work of planning and organizing protests, only to
have the charismatic King arrive later and receive much of the credit. In 1966
the Black Power movement, advocated most forcefully by Carmichael, captured the
nation's attention and suggested that King's influence among blacks was waning.
Black Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated
Black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the
right of blacks to defend themselves against violent attacks had been embraced
by many African Americans.
With internal divisions
beginning to divide the civil rights movement, King shifted his focus to racial
injustice in the North. Realizing that the economic difficulties of blacks in
Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda
by focusing on issues related to black poverty. King established a headquarters
in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests
against housing and employment discrimination in the city. Black Baptist
ministers who disagreed with many of SCLC's tactics, especially the
confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods,
publicly opposed King's efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains
and were often met with violent counter-demonstrations by whites, including
neo-Nazis and members of the, a secret terrorist organization that was opposed
to integration.
Throughout 1966 and 1967 King
increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the
country to economic issues. He began to argue for redistribution of the nation's
economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began planning
a Poor People's Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to address the issue of
economic justice.
Assassination
This
emphasis on economic rights took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking
black garbage workers in the spring of 1968. He was assassinated in Memphis by a
sniper on April 4. News of the assassination resulted in an outpouring of shock
and anger throughout the nation and the world, prompting riots in more than 100
United States cities in the days following King's death. In 1969 James Earl Ray,
an escaped white convict, pleaded guilty to the murder of King and was sentenced
to 99 years in prison. Although over the years many investigators have suspected
that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have ever been identified.
After King's death,
historians researching his life and career discovered that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) often tapped King's phone line and reported on his private
life to the president and other government officials. The FBI's reason for
invading his privacy was that King associated with Communists and other
"radicals."
After his death, King came to
represent black courage and achievement, high moral leadership, and the ability
of Americans to address and overcome racial divisions. Recollections of his
criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and poverty faded, and his soaring rhetoric
calling for racial justice and an integrated society became almost as familiar
to subsequent generations of Americans as the Declaration of Independence.
King's historical importance
was memorialized at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Social Justice, a
research institute in Atlanta. Also in Atlanta is the Martin Luther King, Jr.
National Historic Site, which includes his birthplace, the Ebenezer Church, and
the King Center, where his tomb is located. Perhaps the most important memorial
is the national holiday in King's honor, designated by the Congress of the
United States in 1983 and observed on the third Monday in January, a day that
falls on or near King's birthday of January 15.
William H. Gates
Chairman and Chief Software Architect
Microsoft Corporation
William (Bill) H. Gates
is chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the leading
provider, worldwide, of software for the personal computer. Microsoft had
revenues of $19.75 billion for the fiscal year ending June 1999, and employs
more than 32,000 people in 60 countries.
Born on October 28,
1955, Gates and his two sisters grew up in Seattle. Their father, William H.
Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late mother, Mary Gates, was a
schoolteacher, University of Washington regent and chairwoman of United Way
International.
Gates attended public
elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he began his career in
personal computer software, programming computers at age 13.
In 1973, Gates entered
Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve
Ballmer, now Microsoft's president and CEO. While at Harvard, Gates developed
the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer -- the MITS Altair.
In his junior year,
Gates dropped out of Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he
had begun in 1975 with Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the personal computer
would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began
developing software for personal computers.
Gates' foresight and
vision regarding personal computing have been central to the success of
Microsoft and the software industry. Gates is actively involved in key
management and strategic decisions at Microsoft, and plays an important role in
the technical development of new products. A significant portion of his time is
devoted to meeting with customers and staying in contact with Microsoft
employees around the world through e-mail.
Under
Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission has been to continually advance and
improve software technology and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more
enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term
view, reflected in its investment of more than $3 billion on research and
development in the current fiscal year.
In 1999, Gates wrote
Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how digital processes can
solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. Co-authored by Collins
Hemingway, the book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than
60 countries. Business @ the Speed of Thought has received wide critical acclaim
and was listed on the best-seller lists of the New York Times, USA Today, the
Wall Street Journal and Amazon.com. Gates' previous book, The Road Ahead,
published in 1995, held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list
for seven weeks.
Gates has donated the
proceeds of both books to non-profit organizations that support the use of
technology in education and skills development.
In addition to his
passion for computers, Gates is interested in biotechnology. He sits on the
board of the Icos Corporation and is a shareholder in Darwin Molecular, a
subsidiary of British-based Chiroscience. He also founded Corbis Corporation,
which is developing one of the largest resources of visual information in the
world -- a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and
private collections around the globe. Gates also has invested with cellular
telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in Teledesic, a company that is working on an
ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbit satellites around the globe to
provide worldwide two-way broadband telecommunications service.
Bill and Melinda Gates
have endowed a foundation with more than $17 billion to support philanthropic
initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that as we
move into the 21st century, advances in these critical areas will be available
for all people. To date, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed
more than $300 million to organizations working in global health; more than $300
million to improve learning opportunities, including the Gates Library
Initiative to bring computers, Internet Access and training to public libraries
in low-income communities in the United States and Canada; more than $54 million
to community projects in the Pacific Northwest; and more than $29 million to
special projects and annual giving campaigns.
Gates was married on
Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates. The couple has two children: a daughter,
Jennifer Katharine Gates, born in 1996; and a son, Rory John Gates, born in
1999.
Gates is an avid
reader and enjoys playing golf and bridge.
(1847-1931)
19th
Century
His
inventions not only reshaped modernity but also promised a future bounded only
by creativity
In
1926 the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "The greatest invention
of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention." That
method, Whitehead added, "has broken up the foundations of the old
civilization." Thomas Alva Edison never thought of himself as a
revolutionary; he was a hardworking, thoroughly practical man, a problem solver
who cared little about ideas for their own sake. But he was also the most
prodigious inventor of his era, indeed of all time, and he was recognized as the
spirit of a new age by his contemporaries. They observed the amazing new
products streaming out of his New Jersey laboratory and, sensing magic, named
Edison the Wizard of Menlo Park.
There
was a sort of magic about Edison, although it had nothing to do with illusions
or misdirections. An assistant once described the Wizard at work,
"displaying cunning in the way he neutralizes or intensifies
electromagnets, applying strong or weak currents, and commands either negative
or positive directional currents to do his bidding." But behind his arcane
dexterity lay Edison's exhaustive research and his tenacious unwillingness to
quit tinkering until a technical challenge had been met. "Genius," he
famously remarked, "is about 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration." Or
again, as he said in his autobiography, "There is no substitute for hard
work."
Edison's
tireless work habits took shape during his childhood in Port Huron, Mich. His
formal education, according to most accounts, lasted only three months; he quit
school after a teacher pronounced him "addled." His mother, herself a
former teacher, educated him for a while at home, but the boy's growing
fascination with chemistry soon led him into a rigorous course of independent
study. To pay for the materials needed for his experiments, Edison at age 12 got
a job as a candy and newspaper salesman on the Grand Trunk Railway. By the time
he was 16, he had learned telegraphy and began working as an operator at various
points in the Middle West; in 1868 he joined the Boston office of Western Union.
It was here that he read Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in
Electricity and decided to work full-time as an inventor.
His
first patent, for an electric vote recorder, taught him a lesson that would
guide the rest of his career. There was no demand, at the time, for electric
vote recorders, and his device earned him nothing. Edison vowed never again to
invent something unless he could be sure it was commercially marketable.
Fortunately
for him, America during the post-Civil War boom of the 1870s was famished for
faster and more reliable ways of doing business. An improvement Edison made in
the stock ticker eventually earned him $40,000, a considerable sum at the time.
He used this windfall to set up and staff a shop in Newark, N.J., to manufacture
these tickers. But other companies began besieging Edison for technical advice,
and in 1876 he moved his operation to Menlo Park and created the world's first
industrial-research facility, a humming workplace dedicated to improving or
creating new products for pay. Some think that Menlo Park itself, which showed
the industrialized world a new method of making progress, was Edison's most
influential invention.
Other
candidates for this honor soon abounded. Edison was working on a problem in
telegraphy in 1877 when he noticed that a stylus drawn rapidly across the
embossed symbols of the Morse code produced what he later described as "a
light, musical, rhythmical sound, resembling human talk heard
indistinctly." If it was possible, he reasoned, to "hear" dots
and dashes, might not the human voice be reproduced in a similar manner? After
much trial and error, Edison gathered a small group of witnesses and recited
"Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a strange-looking contraption. The
spectators were amazed to hear the machine play back Edison's high-pitched
voice. The phonograph was born.
Edison
is commonly called the inventor of the light bulb. In truth, he and his
co-workers accomplished far more than that. In 1879 they created an incandescent
lamp with a carbonized filament that would burn for 40 hours, but a working
laboratory model was only the first step. How could they make this device
illuminate the world? For this they would need a host of devices, including
generators, motors, junction boxes, safety fuses and underground conductors,
many of which did not exist. Amazingly, only three years later Edison opened the
first commercial electric station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan; it served
roughly 85 customers with 400 lamps and pioneered the inexorable process of
turning night into day.
Either
alone or as the supervisor of his research teams, Edison amassed more than 1,000
patents, including one for the movie camera. That invention alone would have
ensured his lasting renown, but it was only one of the many contributions Edison
made to the now ubiquitous technological environment. He created the look and
sound of contemporary life. He cared not at all about the fame and wealth he
earned as long as he was allowed to get on with his work. He never lost the
relentless desire to learn and to make things that had animated him as a boy. He
remained the most childlike of titans. Once, he was signing a guest book and
came to the INTERESTED IN column. Edison wrote, "Everything."
ILLUSTRATIONS
Art
for What's Sake?
"Journalism
is unreadable and literature is not read," Oscar Wilde, above, lamented.
The literary mainstream was commanded by the likes of Charles Dickens, bottom,
and his reportorial novels, while Wilde led an aesthetic movement. Like Tom
Wolfe vs. John Updike today. Except Wolfe is in Wilde's clothing.
Most
Obsessive Artist
Impressionism
gave way to Cubism as Paul Cezanne rendered the world "in terms of the
cylinder, the sphere, the cone." He would attack the same subject in canvas
after canvas to discover its geometry. "There's a minute of life
passing," he said. "Paint it in its reality and forget everything to
do that!"
Best
Doc and Best Bud
Louis
Pasteur's medical discoveries saved countless lives. But pasteurization also
saved industries and helped beermakers export safe brew everywhere.
Worst
Prophecy So Far
Karl
Marx's: "Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of
nature, its own negation." By 2000, communism had won and lost a world.
Most
Infectious Tyrant
Napoleonic
egomania would inspire dictators well into the 20th century. Bonaparte
embellished his own legend with portraits and enigmatic anecdotes. When he moved
into the rundown Tuileries palace, an associate said, "How sad this place
is, General." Napoleon's reply: "Yes, like greatness."
Women
In and Out of Power
Britain's
Queen Victoria, center left, epitomized an age of plenty but assumed the throne
in 1837 only because her uncle William IV died childless. China's Empress
Dowager Cixi, near left, was a mere concubine but acquired enormous clout by
bearing the Emperor his only son. Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, far left,
succeeded a brother but lost her kingdom to white sugar planters, who got
America to annex it in 1898.
Signs
and Portents
