Top 10 Richest People On The List - Page [2/2]

6)      Charles Koch: 

He has made it to the top 10 list, overtaking the likes of Eike Batista, Stefan Persson and Karl Albrecht. His net worth is $34 billion. He and his brother David hold 80 percent of Koch Industries.

Charles Koch

7)      David Koch: 

His net worth is $34 billion. He and his brother Charles 80 percent of Koch Industries. The Koch brothers' net worth was up by nine percent each this year.

David Koch

8)      Li Ka-shing: 

He is Asia's richest person with net worth of $31 billion. The chairman of Hutchison Whampoa Limited was world's ninth richest man in 2012. His wealth increased by $5.5 billion in 2013.

Li Ka-shing

9)      Liliane Bettencourt and family: 

The 90-year-old L'Oreal heiress has a net worth of $30 billion, up $6 billion this year after shares of the cosmetic firm surged this year.

Liliane Bettencourt

10)  Bernard Arnault: 

The 63-year-old man from France, who is the Chairman of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, slipped from fourth to 10th place. His net worth fell from $41 billion in 2012 to $29 billion in 2013.

Bernard Arnault

Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.in/

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Top 10 Richest People On The List - Page [1/2]

The number of billionaires across the world has risen from 1,226 in 2012 to 1,426 this year, with the US topping the list with 442, followed by Asia-Pacific (386), Europe (366), the Americas (129) and the Middle East & Africa (103),according to Forbes magazine.

Carlos Slim Helu from Mexico is the richest man in the world, followed by Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett. Charles Koch, David Koch and Liliane Bettencourt and family making it to the top 10. Eike Batista, Stefan Persson and Karl Albrecht lost their positions in this list.

Here is Forbes' list of the 10 richest people in the world:

1)      Carlos Slim Helu: 

The Mexican telecom mogul is the richest man in the world with a net worth of $73 billion, which is $4 billion up from 2012. He has retained the top spot for the fourth consecutive year.

Carlos Slim Helu

2)      Bill Gates: 

The co-founder of Microsoft comes second with net worth of $67 billion, which is $6 billion more than what he earned in 2012. He has gained from investments like Ecolab, Republic Services and FEMSA.

Bill Gates

3)      Amancio Ortega: 

He jumped two places, overtaking Warren Buffett and Bernard Arnault, to become the world's third richest man. His net worth is $57 billion, $19.5 billion up from his 2012's $37.5 billion. He holds 60 percent share of clothing retailer Inditex.

Amancio Ortega

4)      Warren Buffett: 

He has slipped from third place in 2012 to fourth place in the list of world's richest people. The chairman and CEO of Berkshire has a net worth of $53.5 billion, as against $46 billion in 2012.

Warren Buffett

5)      Larry Ellison: 

The CEO of Oracle is the fifth richest with $43 billion. He was in the sixth place last year with a fortune of $36 billion. He has also ventured into real estate and aviation.

Larry Ellison

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Top 10 Awesome Men with Mental llnesses - Page [2/2]

5

Edgar Allan Poe

Known for his dark writings and tales of horror, Edgar Allen Poe was extremely interested in psychology. His fascination shows in his writings of madmen and psychological thrillers. But was he himself mad? A rival, Rufus Griswold, said so by publishing a libelous obituary in revenge for things Poe had written or said about him. Though Griswold’s account of Poe as a crazy man was dismissed, Poe may have had bipolar disorder. Poe was also known for his heavy drinking and once wrote in a letter that he had experienced suicidal thoughts. Poe once caused a sensation by writing a news story about a balloon trip across the ocean – later revealed as a hoax.

4

Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes was a brilliant aviator, movie producer, and business tycoon worth billions of dollars. He was also a crazy man suffering from a fear of germs. An article, Hughes’s Germ Phobia Revealed in Psychological Autoposy, published by the American Psychological Association in 2005 suggests that his phobia became so severe that it likely contributed to his codeine addiction and reclusiveness. Hughes had a lifelong pattern of withdrawing in times of stress. As an adolescent, he became paralyzed for no apparent physiological reason for several months. His fear of germs led to obsessive-compulsive behaviors, many of which he insisted his staff adopt (such as layering their hands with paper towels when serving food to him). Hughes was known to lay naked in dark “germ free” zones and wear tissue boxes on his feet in a bizarre attempt to protect them.

3

John Nash

Remember the movie, A Beautiful Mind? The real life subject of the movie, John Nash, is a mathematical genius and recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. He earned his doctorate from Princeton University and developed the Nash equilibrium theory. He also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions, and “voices.” He was committed to several psychiatric hospitals, always against his will, where he was treated with antipsychotic drugs and insulin shock therapy. Nash recovered gradually, eventually returning to teach math at Princeton University.

2

Ludwig Van Beethoven

One of the world’s most famous composers, Ludwig van Beethoven, is believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder. Beethoven was a prodigy who was both beaten and exploited by his father. The beatings may have led to his hearing loss later in life. Like many creative geniuses suffering from bipolar disorder, bursts of manic energy, intensity, and creativity were balanced by periods of darkness, loneliness, and depression. Like others suffering from the disorder, he self-medicated with drugs (opium) and alcohol.

1

Sir Isaac Newton

Undoubtedly one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus, developed the laws of motion, explained gravity, and built the first reflective telescope. He was also crazy. He was reportedly psychotic, hard to get along with, and prone to dramatic mood swings. Several authors have suggested that he suffered from bipolar disorder and was schizophrenic.

Though far from perfect, these crazy men have touched the world in some way. They’ve made us think, they’ve inspired, or they’ve made us appreciate the fragility of life which can be shattered like glass when mental illness is involved.

Source: http://listverse.com/

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10

King Charles VI of France

King Charles VI of France was also known as Charles the Mad. He reigned France from 1380 to 1422. About a dozen years after taking the throne, his descent into madness began. He suffered from multiple episodes of mental illness including a time when he could not remember his name or that he was the King. He often did not recognize his wife or children. For a five month period in 1405, he refused to bathe or change his clothes. According to writings by Pope Pius II, King Charles VI believed he was made of glass (a condition later labeled as “glass delusion” – sounds crazy I know – but it is real and has featured on Listverse before on our list of fascinating factlets) and had to take measures (such as refusing to allow anyone to touch his royal person and wearing reinforced clothing) to ensure he didn’t break.

9

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is well known as being the 16th President of the United States. Despite his accomplishments, President Lincoln was prone to what he called “a tendency to melancholy.” While everyone gets sad from time to time, Lincoln reportedly experienced severe, debilitating depression. Some biographers speculate that he may have contemplated suicide. According to a profile of Lincoln published by Ability Magazine, he often wept uncontrollably over the plight of the desperate and used humor to balance his sadness. He also reportedly relied on work and fatalistic, religious, and resignation feelings to cope with his bouts of melancholia.

8

Vincent Van Gogh

You’ve likely heard of Vincent Van Gogh, the famous crazy artist who cut off his own ear and later committed suicide. He is believed to have had epileptic seizures caused by a brain lesion brought on by the prolonged use of absinthe, a highly alcoholic drink. His great enthusiasm for art and religion coupled with his fast pace of painting followed by periods of deep depression lend credibility to the widely held idea that he also suffered from bipolar disorder. Vincent was also a prolific writer, having written hundreds of letters. Some believe he also had from hypergraphia, a condition linked to epilepsy and mania characterized by an overwhelming urge to write.

7

Ernest Hemingway

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author, Ernest Hemingway, was the victim of depression and alcoholism. Like Van Gogh, he ultimately chose to end it all by suicide. Hemingway’s father, brother, sister, and granddaughter also chose the same fate. While a predilection to suicide may have resided in his DNA, Hemingway’s mental health in his final years was likely affected by a lifetime of heavy drinking, medication with mentally disruptive side effects which hospitalized him, and shock therapy which caused memory loss and may have intensified his depression.

6

Tennessee Williams

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams was burdened with depression even before two troubling events transpired that sent him into deeper, more serious bouts involving drug and alcohol abuse. Williams was born into a family that had a history of serious mental illness. In the mid-1940s, his sister, a schizophrenic, underwent a lobotomy. In 1961, his long-time lover died. Both events mentally affected Williams deeply, sending him into dark depressions and substance abuse. Despite detoxification attempts, Williams suffered from depression and substance abuse for the rest of his life.

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Top 10 Crazy Bastards Who Actually Changed The World - Part [2/2]

5. Henry Cavendish

Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

What he did:

Cavendish was an instrumental figure in the scientific community. Aside from discovering hydrogen, he also calculated the density of the planet earth with surprising accuracy using only a couple of lead balls and his own intellect. This may not sound too important, but it was influential in the field of astrophysics, because it led to many important breakthroughs, including the calculation of the gravitational constant of the universe. He also did great work with electricity, discovering the concept of voltage, the formula for the capacitance of a capacitor and a unit for it (now called the Farad), Ohms law, Coulombs Law, Richter's law of Reciprocal Proportions, Dalton's law of Partial Pressures, and Wheatstone's laws of parallel circuitry.

So, what's so crazy about him?

You may have noticed, all his discoveries are named after other people. Henry was a bit of a loner. He almost never left his house, except when he needed equipment, or to go to the Royal Society Club, where he barely talked to anyone unless they had something really important to say. He never entertained visitors at his house, and actually had a hidden staircase in his house so he could get around without encountering his housekeeper, who he communicated with via letters left on a special table. There is one account where a fan of his work ambushed him at his door in an attempt to tell him how great he was, only to have Cavendish scream and run into the woods, to be coaxed out two hours later.

All the discoveries listed above under someone else's name, are there because Cavendish didn't publish them. Instead they sat in his attic for almost a hundred years collecting dust, until a man named James Clerk Maxwell showed up, and found them. By that point, people were starting to make these discoveries on their own. In essence, Cavendish was almost a century ahead of his time, but didn't get any credit for it because of his terrifyingly bad social skills.

4. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

Source: Project Gutenberg

What he did:

Back in the 1800s, breakfast meant one of two things. If you were rich, it meant eggs. If not, it was porridge. John Kellogg and his brother Will changed that. They invented the first cereal in the world: Corn Flakes! A cheap and tasty (albeit slightly bland) breakfast food. This paved the way for a whole new era in the land of breakfast. An era where instead of gruel, porridge, or other boiled grains, one had dozens of foods to choose from, each represented by it's own anthropomorphic cartoon animal, with dozens of games and puzzles on the back, and toys and decoder rings on the inside.

So what's so crazy about him?

The thing which no one pays attention to, and which will never make that little side-panel on the box with the explanation of how "ever since its conception, Kellogg's has been dedicated to quality" is why he made Corn Flakes in the first place.

Dr. Kellogg was a strong believer in nutrition, and felt that a simple diet low in sugar and energy, would be paramount in preventing little children from masturbating. Yes, for real. You see, Kellogg felt that masturbation was what was eating away at society and destroying all that was good in the world. You may laugh, but it's proven to cause a number of serious health problems including (but not limited to): insomnia, fatigue, excessive hair-loss, excessive hair growth, weight-loss, weight-gain, blindness, nausea, insanity, gout, cancer, homosexuality, and communism.

He was the founding father of several movements including the "Race Betterment Foundation," part of the early eugenics movement. He was also a strong advocate of circumcision. Not circumcision at birth, mind you. He felt that it should be done as punishment when little Billy is caught fiddling with his boner in the bathtub:

[The procedure] should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid [phenol] to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.

He maintained that circumcision would work almost one hundred percent of the time, because "following the cicatrisation of the wounds, the skin will cover the organ tight...which will considerably hamper masturbation or eradicate it altogether."

For the record, it doesn't.

Along with restrictive dieting, circumcision, and his diabolical acid treatment, he also advocated tying the subject's hands together, putting their genitals in special devices that would make an erection intolerably painful, electroshock therapy, and sewing the foreskin shut.

He also once preformed a clitorectomy on a nine-year-old. If you don't know what that is, just take our word for it that you're better off not knowing.

So that's why we have Corn Flakes. Oh, his brother Will was the one who invented Frosted Flakes. Johnny flipped s***, we don't mind saying.

3. Nikolai Tesla

Source: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

What he did:

Tesla's contributions to humanity are too many to all be listed here. Among other things, he invented AC, the Induction motor, the Tesla Coil, Wireless Technology, Radio Astronomy, Radar, and Robotics. He was also the guy who thought up the Death Ray, although he never actually got around to building one (that we know of).

So what's so crazy about him?

Tesla was very OCD. And that doesn't just mean he washed his hands more often than Lady Macbeth. He had an obsession with the number 3 to an almost frightening extent. Whenever he entered a building, he first had to circle the blocks 3 times clockwise, he only stayed in a hotel room if the room number was divisible by 3, and he always used exactly 9 napkins, which he kept in three stacks of three, and spent many of his meals calculating the volume of his food before eating it. He also loved pigeons to the point that he would import special seeds for feeding them in the park, and would sometimes capture them live and take them back to his apartment with him.

He hated jewelry (especially pearls, earrings, and pearl earrings), refused to touch anything with any amount of dust on it, and was terrified of anything round and/or metal. Of course that last one could just be a healthy reaction to working in a lab where most of the round, metal objects would fry you on contact.

 2. Andrew Jackson

Source: Stock Montage/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

What he did:

Won a major battle in New Orleans in the War of 1812 (the one where Canada burned down the White House), securing the respect of his peers. He was elected as the seventh president of the U.S.A., where he helped form the American Political system, and got his face on the 20 dollar bill. In his term he reduced national Debt, caused several structural changes to the bureaucratic and political system (including the implementation of the Spoils System), and pushed for expansionism, allowing the US to grow to the size it is today. He also helped screw the Indians out of all their land.

So what's so crazy about him?

Jackson was what we in the Biz call a "Badass Motherf***er." He earned the nickname "Old Hickory" in his war days for being almost completely indestructible, and for regularly beating the s*** out of people with a hickory walking stick. He won the battle at New Orleans by virtue of his both being a hard-ass, and by hiring a crap-load of pirates to help out. That's right, freaking pirates. They even brought their cannons down into the artillery. His men won with only about 24 deaths.

He was also known for participating in a great many duels. Understand that back then, duels were fought with muskets, the most hideously inaccurate gun in the history of guns. This meant a duel consisted of just shooting at one another until the other guy was so scared and/or bloodied that he surrendered. During his duels, Jackson sustained so many bullet wounds that (according to biographer Chris Wallace) he was known to "rattle like a bag of marbles" when he walked, and cough up blood on a regular basis. After seeing the guy take a few shots to the abdomen, and taking a few themselves, most surrendered, and Jackson only once ever actually killed a man in a duel.

This unlucky individual was Charles Dickinson, who was convinced by Jackson's political opponents to make fun of his wife, who Jackson he married before she divorced her first husband. Jackson, who just didn't stand for that kinda s***, challenged him to a duel. Then, even though Dickinson was well known as being an award-winning marksman, he let Dickinson shoot first. Just to reiterate, he actually had made money off of being particularly good at shooting things, and Jackson let him be first to try to shoot at him. Dickinson shot him square in the chest, missing his heart by about one inch. While any sane human being would have screamed all bloody hell and called for a medic, Jackson straightened up and shot the guy in the face, killing him instantly.

Jackson was also the first president on whom an assassination was attempted. The would-be assassin (a guy named Richard Lawrence who thought he was King Richard the Third) opted to try to shoot Jackson, even though he was by now probably more bullet than actual living flesh. Lawrence ran up to him, pulled out his gun, pointed at Jackson's heart, and pulled the trigger.

The gun misfired. So he pulled out a second gun he brought with him, pointed it at his heart, and pulled the trigger. In what can only be called a statistical miracle, it also misfired. Jackson charged the man with fire in his eyes, and proceeded to beat the living s*** out of him with his walking stick until his aides pulled him off, with the help of local bystanders (including Davy Crockett). Lawrence later said that he "only felt genuine fear when he saw the 67-year-old president charge."

 1. Pythagoras

Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

What he did:

Pythagoras was one of the founding fathers of mathematics. Aside from being credited with writing the Pythagorean Theorem, he also conducted a great deal of work with sound and harmonics, and discovered the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is a number that represents the geometric relationship "A is to B what B is to C" and it appears a good deal in nature as well as art. You may recall that there was a long and overall pointless chapter in The Da Vinci Code completely devoted to the subject.

Pythagoras also created a model of the universe in which the universe was a series of glass spheres, all turning in harmony, with the earth at the center. This dominated astronomy for about 2,000 years, and was the favored view of the Catholic church who felt it was proof of God. And we all know that you can't argue with the Catholics, or they'll send the black Austrian Jews after you.

So what's so crazy about him?

He had a cult. A weird one. Not, you know, one of the average, Jesus-lives-in-a-spaceship-under-Antarctica cults. No, this was a number cult. Sure, they had all the weird rules. Have sex in the summer, not the winter, only drink water, only eat uncooked foods, don't wear wool, etc. Oh, and never ever eat beans. They make you fart and are "like the genitalia" therefore they are pure evil.

But they were also obsessed with numbers and geometry. Every number was a shape and every shape represented a number. And every number-shape had a purpose, a divine meaning, and a place in the order of everything. And Pythagoras loved them all.

Their symbol was a number-shape (of course), it was the number five, the pentagram, because the pentagram was infinite. The pentagram contained a pentagon. The pentagon, if all corners were connected, formed another pentagram, which was proportionate in every way to the original and which formed another pentagon. Pythagoras saw more numbers in music, in the ratios of the strings and the beauty of the notes. In fact, his views on philosophy can be summarized in his own words "All is numbers."

Unfortunately his idea of numbers and geometry can only allow numbers to be expressed as ratios with nice whole numbers (i.e. 2/3 instead of .66666). Decimals didn't exist. This meant that irrational numbers such as Pi, which continue forever in a non-repeating decimal fashion and can't be represented as fractions, are impossible to represent.

So when a guy named Hippasus said "hey guys, this doesn't work here..." Pythagoras did what any rational person does when someone is a threat to their beliefs. Which is to get their secret brotherhood of math nerds to kidnap him, tie him up, take him out in the middle of a lake, light the boat on fire, and disappear into the night.

That's right, they killed the guy over Pi. And he wasn't the only one. Anyone who had a proof that was a threat to Pythagoras' vision of a perfect, rational, measurable universe was to be silenced.

Pythagoras' end came when he denied a few people entry into his elite group of math nerds. They came in a mob to torch his house, and he ran away out the back with them hot in pursuit. Supposedly this continued until he came to a large field of beans. Given the option between the Angry Mob and the Bean Field, he just turned around and let them kill him.

This guy made math what it is today. Damn, eh?

Source: http://www.spike.com/

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Top 10 Crazy Bastards Who Actually Changed The World - Part [1/2]

10. W. C. Minor

Source: Oxford University Press

What he did:

The Oxford English Dictionary was notable as being one of the first well-organized and well-compiled dictionaries. Indeed, it was more or less the first dictionary that didn't suck, and which made an attempt to catalogue all the words in the English language, not just the ones that were tricky. Eventually, a few professors realized that all the dictionaries of the time were aggravatingly laid out and just generally crappy, so they set about making a better one.

One of the many problems they identified was that there weren't any good example quotations that demonstrated how to use the word in a sentence. Unfortunately to rectify that problem, they needed someone who could compile such quotations and definitions, and match them up to every word ever written. They were to busy to do it, and they didn't have the funding to pay anyone to do it, so they put out word that they needed volunteers for an frighteningly menial task. They didn't get a whole lot of go-getters.

Of the people who did volunteer was William Chester Minor, an American surgeon who loved the English language. Minor compiled an enormous quantity of words with quotations and definitions that he could call up on demand. He compiled lists of every instance of every word in all the books he owned, and was by far the most efficient of the volunteers for the OED. He became close friends with the Editor of the OED, Dr. James Murray, and they would eat lunch several times a week. Indeed without his contribution, the OED would have probably been as poorly done as all the others and dictionaries would continue to suck to this day.

So what's so crazy about him?

He did all of this while incarcerated in the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, after going nuts and killing a father of six-with-one-more-on-the-way named George Merett, who Minor thought was out to get him. During his interment he had little else to do, so he hoarded definitions and quotations the way that lady down the street hoards stray cats. Meanwhile his mental condition became continued to deteriorate until he cut his dick off with a straight razor, and they shipped him back to America. 

9. Tycho Brahe

Source: Eduard Ender

What he did:

Before Galileo, there was Tycho Brahe. Tycho Brahe catalogued the motion of every star, planet, UFO, and ball of ignited swamp gas in the heavens for much of his life, information that was surprisingly important for its time and allowed the creation of the laws of planetary motion.  His carefulness and scientifically rigorous methodology are considered to have been essential for setting the stage of the scientific revolution.

So what's so crazy about him?

Many famous geniuses were drunks, but few were as spectacularly so as Tycho Brahe. Dinner at his house would put most modern day drunken college frat parties to shame. Not only did he tend to do stupid things when he was drunk (at a Christmas party when he was 20 he got into a duel with a man in a pitch black room and lost his nose in the process), but his house was like a goddamn circus. Since Brahe at one time had a net worth of about one percent of the entire wealth Denmark and lived in a castle, the guy knew how to throw a hell of a party. Among other shenanigans, one thing he was known for was having a dwarf in his employ named Jepp who Brahe maintained was clairvoyant. Jepp's full-time job consisted of wearing a jester's outfit, sitting under the table at dinner, and whatever else a psychic midget is supposed to do. He also had a pet moose that would drink with the rest of them, until one day it got totally s***faced and fell down a flight of stairs.  When was the last time you were at a party and a drunk moose fell down the stairs? We thought so.

 8. Samuel Morse

 

Source: Project Gutenberg

What he did:

He invented the first electrical telegraph, and made Morse code, the language used in communication for over a hundred years. This worked wonders in the advancement of civilization, as it provided a means of communication over long distance in short time, as well being the forerunner of modern binary code.

So what's so crazy about him?

He was a little paranoid. He was determined that the Blacks, Jews, Catholics and the entire nation of Austria were working to destroy the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of America. He wrote several books on the subject in which he talked about how the immigrants and lesser races were oppressing all the white people, how the Jews and Catholics were working together to kill Protestants, and how all of these groups met on a regular basis in the basement of an orphanage in Ireland. Oh, and Austria's in there too somewhere.

Ironically, when the telegraph became widespread it allowed people to arrange in advance for their arrival when they immigrated. This led to a massive storm of immigration into the USA and filling it with people of different ethnicities, religions, and all the other things that are obviously conspiring against the poor oppressed WASPs of the country. So Morse ended up dying locked in his house afraid of going out for fear of the Catholic-Austrian-Immigrant Jews that were taking over the world.

 7. Yoshiro Nakamatsu

Source: YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/Getty Images

What he did:

At 81 years old, Nakamatsu has over 3,000 patents, giving him the record for the most patents in the history of ever (Thomas Edison only had a little over a thousand, most of which he ripped off).

Chances are you encounter several of his inventions on a regular basis. He invented the CD, the DVD, the digital watch, and the taxicab meter.

So what's so crazy about him?

Nakamatsu meticulously catalogues, records, and analyses everything he eats, in a bid to survive to the age of exactly 144. No more, no less, he is determined to die at that exact number. He sleeps only four hours a night, saying that sleeping over six hours is "very, very bad." His diet is almost exclusively made up of his "Yummy Nutri Brain Food", a combination of seaweed, cheese, yogurt, eel, eggs, beef, and chicken liver.

What is most interesting is his method for inventing things. He holds his breath underwater until he almost dies.He himself says "A lack of oxygen is very important... I get that flash just 0.5 sec before death. I remain under the surface until this trigger comes up and I write it down with a special waterproof Plexiglas writing pad I invented."

Usually when you need a near death experience just to get through the day, you're either insane, or you just have stones the size of basketballs. Or both. 

6. Sergei Bryukhonenko

Source: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms/Prelinger Archive

What he did:

Sergei Bryukhonenko made enormous leaps for medical science, and indeed mankind, when in the early 1920s he invented The Autojector, the worlds first ever life-support machine. It acted as a mechanical heart and lung, and while primitive by today's standards it did the job pretty well. This was the template for pretty much all life support machines that came after, and we probably don't need to tell you how important those are.

So, what's so crazy about him?

In order to test his machine, he needed the dead and the dying, and even though this was back when medical ethics were pretty much left up to whatever the doctor's scruples were, he couldn't very well use people. Instead, he used dogs. Lots and lots of dogs. He would first kill them, then use his system of pumps and bowls to get them going again. As he went on, he got increasingly dramatic, practicing draining the blood from dogs' body, then restoring it and bringing the dog back alive (however brain damaged). Later he started testing if his machine would work only on the whole dogs, or if he could get away with only part of a dog. Like, say, just the head. As it turns out, it is possible to sever a dog's head, hook it up to a bunch of tubes, and keep it alive. Well, only for a few minutes, and in sort of a stupor, but it's the principle that counts.

All things considered, the man was only a castle, a hunchback, and poorly recorded lightning track from being Victor freaking Frankenstein.

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Top 10 Famous People On History - Part [2/2]

5

Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

c. 563–c. 483 B.C.

Google searches: 4 million+ per month

Number of books: c. 7 million

You might be surprised to know that most of the people who google Buddha are not Buddhists. In the Western Hemisphere and throughout Europe, Buddhism is not as well understood as the three major monotheisms. A few clarifications:

Gautama was probably born in Kapilavastu or Lumbini, Nepal in about 563 B.C., about 24 years after Babylon sacked Jerusalem. Gautama was a mortal man who attained Nirvana, or spiritual awakening and peace of mind, at the age of 35, while seated under a Pipal tree, now referred to as the Bodhi tree, in Bodh Gaya, India. The tree growing there now was planted in 288 B.C. from a seed of the original. Buddha sat in meditation for 49 days until he attained the knowledge of how to thoroughly end suffering for all people on Earth. The people do have to follow his teaching in order to free themselves from the various griefs of life.

This is called the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right concentration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, and right mindfulness. If you hold to all these, you will be able to put away all worries and you will be truly happy and unaffected by anything. Buddha rejected the notion of any literature being infallible, and argued that truth must be experienced to be known.

Gautama, the Supreme Buddha, is worshipped in Hinduism as well, as one of the ten representations of Vishnu, who is the god above all others. Baha’i also venerates Gautama as a mortal manifestation of God, who descended to teach mankind to love one another and how to be happy. Gautama is traditionally said to have died in about 411 B.C., at the age of 150 or so. Modern scholars place his death at about 483, at the age of 80.

4

Moses

c. 1300–c. 1180 B.C.

Google searches: 2.7 million+ per month

Number of books: c. 8 million

Moses is revered but not worshipped by all three major monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Baha’i. He is regarded as the greatest prophet of the Old Testament; the liberator of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt; their leader into Canaan, the Promised Land; and their lawgiver, who relayed God’s commandments to the Jews, and founded much of Jewish life and tradition.

The Pharaoh’s daughter, usually named Bithiah, found the infant Moses in a basket floating in the Nile and took him as her own son. She named him after the Hebrew verb “to draw,” since she drew him out of the river. No information is given on Moses’s life, except that he was raised in the Egyptian noble household, and that one day he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and saved the Hebrew by killing the Egyptian. He then hid in the wilderness, and met Jethro, who was a follower of the precursor faith to Islam.

Jethro gave him Zipporah, his daughter, to be his wife, and Moses met God for the first time, who showed himself in the form of a burning bush. Moses then bravely returned to Egypt and, with God’s help, forced the Pharaoh to let his people go. Moses was about 80 years old when this Exodus began. They wandered the desert wilds for 40 more years, received God’s law through Moses, built an ark into which the law was placed, and finally reached a land flowing with milk and honey, which God promised them. Moses, however, had acted arrogantly when he struck the stone from which water sprang for the Israelites, and so God refused to allow him entrance into Canaan. Moses died at 120 years and God buried him in the Moab valley opposite Mount Nebo. There is a memorial to him there today.

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Abraham

c. 1812–c. 1637 B.C.

Google searches: 9.1 million+ per month

Number of books: c. 2 million

The google searches for Abraham the Old Testament prophet are not as reliable as those for Moses or Adolf Hitler, since quite a few famous historical or fictitious people have been named Abraham. The top three most famous are Abraham of the Bible, Abraham Lincoln, and Abraham van Helsing. But if you were to go, say, the Philippines, and ask the first passerby who Abraham Lincoln was, they might actually not know. Among well over 99% of the world’s cultures and societies, you will not have that problem when asking about the prophet called Abraham.

He is revered by all three monotheisms, as well as Baha’i, as a prophet, and one of the first, if not the first, persons of the Middle East to believe in a single God. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are referred to as “the Abrahamic religions.” In the Bible, God makes a covenant with Abraham because of his devout, unswerving faith in God, while everyone around him follows the newest god to take everyone’s fancy. This covenant is marked by circumcision. God then tests the conviction of Abraham’s faith in him by demanding that he kill his firstborn son, Isaac, to glorify God. Abraham does not hesitate, but takes Isaac up to the top of a mountain and is about to kill him when an angel arrives and tells him to stop. God is immensely impressed and blesses Abraham with fruitfulness: he will be the father of many nations.

Today, Abraham is precisely that. Muslims believe that it was not Isaac, but Ishmael, his other son, whom God told Abraham to sacrifice, and Muslims believe that Ishmael’s lineage led to the next entry. The site of the near sacrifice is traditionally deemed to be where the Dome of the Rock sits today. This shrine is sacred to all three Abrahamic religions.

2

Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh

c. A.D. 570–632

Google searches: 13.6 million+ per month

Number of books: incalculable

To non-Muslims, Muhammad founded Islam. To Muslims, he did not found anything, because the religion, called Islam, was already there, and had to be restored to its proper maintenance. Muslims believe that Muhammad restored the religion and unified it under the philosophies God imparted to him in revelations he wrote down. These became the Q’uran. Islam is the Arabic noun for “a surrendering,” or “a yielding,” in this case to the will of Allah. Muhammad was born about A.D. 570 in Makkah (Mecca), Saudi Arabia. He had 13 wives, which is acceptable and encouraged in Muslim cultures.

Muhammad’s status as second most famous person in history is especially remarkable given that it is illegal according to Islamic law to depict Muhammad in any way (which is why you don’t see him in the above picture). That law dictates that Muhammad is the last prophet to have been sent by God to teach mankind the ways of peace and righteousness, and that he is too holy to be viewed by our sinful eyes. For this reason, very few films have been made about him. The most notable was The Message (1977), the premiere of which incited suicide bombings throughout the Middle East and protests around the world, until everyone realized that Muhammad is not actually depicted; rather, the camera’s point of view represents him: the film is seen through his eyes.

If you’d like to know, there is nothing in the Q’uran that states, “To kill Americans, both civil and military, is the duty of every Muslim who is able.” That nonsense was concocted by various Middle Eastern leaders over the years, mostly in the last half of the 20th Century and beyond. These leaders know full well that knowledge is power and have done their level best to hoard literacy education from the public. The literacy rate in Yemen is currently about 70%, which is terrible compared to “more civilized” countries like the USA, England, Germany, and Japan. And because the Middle Eastern Muslim public largely cannot read the Q’uran, the governments disseminate anti-American, anti-Western lies to indoctrinate them into hatred.

Muhammad died on 8 June A.D. 632 in Medina, Saudi Arabia, having united the whole of the Middle East under a single God, whose name is Allah. There are many spellings of Muhammad, including Mohammed, Moammar, Mehmet, Mahomet, and others. Because of him, Muhammad is the most common given name in the world, with about 200 million carriers. “Muhammad” means “praised.”

If you anticipated Muhammad, you probably anticipated the next entry.

1

Jesus of Nazareth

c. 5 B.C.–c. A.D. 28

Google searches: 24.9 million+ per month

Number of books: incalculable

There’s really no need to explain just what the four Gospels say Jesus did to become famous, but in the interest of fairness, here are the claims: he was born to a virgin, died at about the age of 33 sometime around the year A.D. 33 (plus or minus 5), the most famous victim of crucifixion, and rose from the dead on his own power 3 days later, ascended into Heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father as a manifestation of that God’s only offspring. You can look up the various miracles attributed to him. There are just over 7 billion people on Earth as of this list, and just about one-third precisely, 33.32%, of them, worship Jesus as “the Christ of God.” We may fairly say that these 2.33 billion people know very well who he was/is, and specifics about his life.

It is also indisputable that those followers of Islam and Judaism both know perfectly well who he was. There are some 1.75 billion Muslims on Earth today, or 25% of the global population, and since Jesus is venerated as a very important prophet of their religion, to whom they say Muhammad spoke when he sprang to Heaven on a horse, Jesus is certainly not unknown to them. There are about 1.3 billion atheists the world over, and at least 98% of those people certainly know all about Jesus. It is highly possible that the only people on Earth who have no idea who he was, or anything about him, are those people who belong to the 100 or so primitive, uncontacted tribes remaining around the world, the most well known across the Internet of which are the Envira people of the Brazilian-Peruvian border area, deep in the Amazon Jungle. They have been photographed from helicopter. It is doubtful they know of Jesus, or Muhammad, or anyone else on this list, as they are 100% isolated from the rest of the world’s societies.

Google claims that 129,864,880 books have been written and bound throughout human history and which still survive in book form in some library in the world. That is not as high a number as you might have expected, but we are speaking of different volumes, so only one of the 25 million copies of the Bible printed every single year counts toward this total. Out of these c. 130 million books, it is estimated that 40% are about Jesus. This percentage includes books about Christianity in general, whether evangelical (or anti-evangelical) or historical. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion focuses on God in general, but pays special attention to Christianity, as any atheist apology must, since Christianity is the most popular religion, and thus Dawkins’s book counts as 1 book about Jesus, as it counts as 1 book about Muhammad. So there are some 52 million different books circulating the world right now that are in some way concerned with Jesus, the man who may have lived, who may have walked on water, and risen from the dead. The Gospel of John, one of the 52 million books written about Jesus, ends with this passage: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”

Just missed the cut (many): Confucius, Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Jack the Ripper, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and more.

Source: http://listverse.com/

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