Word: set
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...rational universe, he in effect redesigned the human mind. Newton gave it not only intellectual tools undreamed of before, but with them, unprecedented self-confidence and ambition. If Shakespeare incomparably enlarged humanity's conception of itself, Newton--working later, in the turmoil of the English civil war and Restoration--set in place those cooler universals that were the premise of the 18th century's Age of Reason and the dynamic of the 19th century's age of revolutions--industrial, political and social...
...possibility of heroic sacrifice, a single death that inspires countless others to live their lives differently, a young man in front of a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square. "Five hundred years from now, it won't be Hitler we remember," says theologian Martin Marty. "Hitler may have set the century's agenda; he was a sort of vortex of negative energy that sucked everything else in. But I think God takes fallible human beings like Roosevelt or Churchill and carves them for his purposes. In five centuries, we'll look back and say the story of the century...
...willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies." Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing...
...must place the century in a time capsule, there are better candidates for Person of the Century than its greatest criminal. The large characters, heroes and villains alike, do set the scales on which we balance progress. Evil may be a powerful force, a seductive idea, but is it more powerful than genius, creativity, courage or generosity? The century has offered characters who stretched our understanding and faith in those qualities as well. The heroes not only defeated Hitler; they provided our lasting inspiration as well. "Just as Hitler made us believe we hadn't yet sounded the depths," notes...