Extraordinary circumstances reveal extraordinary people.

Like many of my generation, I think the time between the typewriter and the world wide web was extraordinary.

The typewriter was invented 157 years ago. The world wide web, now known as internet, 36 years ago. I was invented after the typewriter and before the world wide web, 76 years ago.

The time between the typewriter and the world wide web, extraordinary indeed, featured WW1 and WW2 with 40 million dead and 23 million wounded

These extraordinary circumstances revealed the following extraordinary word-users.

Mahatma Gandhi, born 155 years ago
Colette, born 151 ya
Albert Einstein, born 145 ya
Carl Jung, born 141 ya
Coco Chanel, born 141 ya
Eleanor Roosevelt, born 140 ya
Georgia O’Keeffe, born 137 ya
Ludwig Wittgenstein, born 135 ya
Bessie Coleman, born 132 ya
Amelia Earhart, born 127 ya
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born 124 ya
Walt Disney, born 123 ya
Anaïs Nin, born 121 ya
Robert Oppenheimer, born 120 ya
Mother Teresa, born 114 ya
Josephine Baker, born 84 ya

Talaat Pasha, born 150 ya
Joseph Stalin, born 146 ya
Adolf Hitler, born 135 ya
Mao Zedong, born 131 ya
Leonid Brezhnev, born 129 ya
Ruhollah Khomeini, born 124 ya
Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman, born 90 ya
Vladimir Putin, born 73 ya

At first sight, the two groups of word-users, the thumbs-up and the thumbs-down, are total opposites. But at closer look they have much in common.

They have in common that they were contemporaries, sure. But they have more in common than that. The thumbs-up and the thumbs-down individuals, they both have in common that they were among best educated people on Earth. The smartest word-users on the planet at the time.

Makes you wonder what eduction is for, doesn’t it?

To be at peace?

To be at war?

What have we learned?