A POLL about....Great INVENTOR'S ...and SCIENTIST'S

[Uncle Marc]

In your Opinion:

Who is the greatest Inventor or scientist ....or both, and why ?

I'll do make a start with some examples:

1.) Thomas Edison (americ. Inventor with mor than 1100 Patents)
2.) Werner von Braun (German Rocket scientist)
3.) Ferdinand Porsche ( Volkswagen, German battletank's )
4.) James Watt (Inventor of the Steam-Engine)
5.) Henry Ford ( Assembly Line, and his factory was Model for the Volkswagen-Factory in KDF-Stadt bei Fallersleben...WOLFSBURG)
6.) Karl Benz (Inventor of the car 1886)

....what is your personal opinion ? who was the smartest of all!....do you know more Inventors and scientists ?

[Galahad]

Originally Posted by Uncle Marc

In your Opinion:

Who is the greatest Inventor or scientist ....or both, and why ?

I would have to say that Thales (624 - 547 BCE) is uniquely the greatest scientist as he developed the scientific method itself.

Of course, as he was an ancient Greek, he had some rather simplistic views about nature (believing that everything is made of water). However, he delivered a basic principle to occidental thinking - namely, that matter has a basic component.

Thales was the first known human to transcend the muck of mythological thinking in his model of the universe. Although simplistic, (he believed the earth was a disc of stone floating in water, and that earthquakes were caused by the movement of the earth in this pool.) he offered the first physical explination as to why we had earthquakes - once again transcending the notion that earthquakes were created by an angry god or by Vulcan hammering away in a mountain somewhere.

Thales was also the father of natural science, and formed the foundation of Western scientific thought. He delivered the rudimentary geometry of the Egyptians to Greece and carried the craft forward several steps. Some say that he may have developed, at least in part, the Pythagorean theorem prior to Pythagoras. I believe it was he who was the first to use his basic geometry to measure the distance of ships off shore.

To this day, we are still searching for Thales' "water" as we look to the microcosm of nature. His thinking represents a departure from the superstition of ancient man and the establishment of reason as the guidepost by which we measure the universe.

[bedford]

I have to name Edison as the greatest inventor with Tesla in
the running also. As for greatest scientists I am partial to Isaac
Newton, Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin.