Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DNA is likely to be the discovery made in the 20th century that will be the most important to the 21st. The world is just a few years away from deciphering the entire sequence of more than 100,000 human genes encoded by the 3 billion chemical pairs of our...
So should Watson and Crick be Persons of the Century? Perhaps. But two factors count against them. Their role, unlike that of Einstein or Churchill, would have been performed by others if they hadn't been around; indeed, competitor Linus Pauling was just months away from shouting the same eureka...
There's Henry Ford, who perfected ways to mass-produce the horseless carriages developed in Germany by Gottlieb Daimler and others. The car became the most influential consumer product of the century, bringing with it a host of effects good and bad: more personal freedom, residential sprawl, social mobility, highways...
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Wilbur and Orville Wright also used the internal-combustion engine to free people from earthly bounds. Their 12-second flight in 1903 transformed both war and peace. As Bill Gates said in these pages, "Their invention effectively became the World Wide Web of that era, bringing people, languages, ideas and...