We may name the period we dwell within the “data age,” or extra clearly, the age of Invoice Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. No matter you consider the work of those males, their affect on our tradition is simple. Had they lived a century in the past, they could have stated the identical about Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald (who had not but revealed The Info Age). The Nice Gatsby (Not but), Pablo Picasso and Charles Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud.
If we had lived in 1225, our lives would have overlapped with these of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, and Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.
All of that is laid out visually, A large map showing who was alive and whenIt was created earlier this yr by a Reddit consumer referred to as Profound_Whatever. Massive Supposeof Frank Jacobs writeThe map reveals some stunning contemporaneities, corresponding to the truth that present US President Joe Biden “was up to date for a couple of yr with Nikola Tesla (1854-1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating present (AC) system used to distribute electrical energy.”
“One other, newer (and extra puzzling) overlap is with the lifetime of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973). The Lord of the Ringsmatched Just a bit Going again even additional, how many people had been totally conscious that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Martin Luther (1483–1546) had been contemporaries of each other? Or that the lives of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and René Descartes (1596–1650) had been nearly completely synchronized, regardless that the one was the consultant of dogmatic Puritans of the English Civil Battle and the opposite the daddy of contemporary rationalist philosophy, who questioned the central position of faith within the pursuit of reality?
A large map showing who was alive and when The e-book makes use of a color-coding system to divide the individuals whose lives had been written into eight classes: artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Rube Goldberg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Darwin), “enterprise and trade” (together with well-known pirates from Henry Morgan to Blackbeard), and “leaders and villains” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). It is a reminder that we’d do something to fulfill a few of these individuals, or to get in the way in which of others. In fact, the individuals we predict outlined sure historic intervals weren’t all the time seen that means by all who lived throughout these occasions. It does not damage to maintain this in thoughts when contemplating our personal place in historical past.
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Joseph Priestley visualized historical past and nice historic figures in two of probably the most influential infographics of all time (1769)
A five-minute animation charts 2,600 years of Western cultural historical past
4000 years of historical past displayed on a 5-foot “histmap” (an early infographic) from 1931
180,000 years of non secular historical past depicted within the 1943 “Histmap”
10 million years of evolution visualized in a chic, 5-foot-long infographic created in 1931
World Historical past in One Video: Each 12 months from 200,000 B.C. to At this time
Primarily based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his tasks embody the Substack publication. Books about cities And books A metropolis with no state: Strolling by Twenty first-century Los Angeles. Comply with us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
