Their legacies enhanced by the years

It’s quite amazing, how someone, hundreds of years ago, could have thought in the same way as much of our contemporary society does today, and even more confounding when we consider so much has changed as time marches on.

While you have certainly heard of Taylor Swift, I’ll guarantee you haven’t heard of Christine de Pizan. She was the first widely published female composer of ballads and poetry throughout the 14th century to have an international profile through her ‘Book of the City of Ladies,’ and its companion, ‘Treasure of the City of Ladies.’ They must have been as iconic as Swift’s ‘Red’ or ‘Tortured Poets’ albums, or her ‘Eras’ Tour are today, both using their lost loves as their key motivation and subject. Pizan had been driven to poverty by the premature death of her husband, and she wrote, first to survive, and later to expose societal misogyny. Though a far cry from those beginnings, Swift’s signing to Big Machine Records, in 2005 proved her catalyst for questioning male norms.

Poet William Blake, proved far ahead of his time with his miserable poetic description of life in London. A key figure in the Romanticist movement he had seen at first-hand how the adversity of the poor, and the excesses of the wealthy, rather than being equally invigorated by the Industrial Revolution, played out in what he titled, ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience,’ in a collection of his best works, published during the 18th century. He abhorred that child labour, prostitution, poverty and brutality, had all become inescapable in ‘his’ city of London, and detested how the monarchy, the wealthy, the privileged, and the church, all turned a blind eye to their own excesses in the face of the destitution of the common folk. That betrayal is commonly felt in Europe’s capital today, as the rich get richer, and the poor, well, they just survive.

Sociologist and philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, was another ahead of his time throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, with many of his musings on societal injustice suppressed for decades as they may have ‘stirred up,’ dissatisfaction with slavery, universal suffrage, the inheritance hierarchy, animal rights and protection, no-fault divorce, and penal reform norms of the day. His utilitarian views, that the best solutions for any issue are those that achieve the most good for the most people, were considered far too radical at the time. In fact though, his Panopticon concept, is still trumpeted today as a viable model for today’s, and tomorrow’s prison systems.

There is significant impact today also, through the much-revered Ibn Sina, the author of a staggering 240 journals, many of which remain the basis of current medicine for centuries, though written during the 11th century, with his impressive ‘Canon of Medicine’ the most influential. In fact, it was the primary medicinal reference work throughout Europe until nearly 500 years later. A polymath, he wrote then of everything from dentistry to optometry, astronomy to theology, and geology to physiology, while his ‘Danishnama,’ a treatise on knowledge of all things, identified metaphysics and logic as critical disciplines of the future. That is madness!

Finally, the name of Nikola Tesla will be perpetuated forever through Elon Musk’s ‘Tesla’ electric vehicles. The Serbian devoted his life to the study of electric, and after migrating to America at the age of 32, he worked on, and experimented with alternating current, oscillating generators, and polyphaser systems. Tesla’s problem was that he was competing in the same fiscal and research bubble as Thomas Edison, but was still seen as a foreigner, and found it difficult to maintain funding. Nevertheless, his work is more celebrated today than a century ago, as his wireless lighting and wireless electric research has undergone renewed interest given the space-age technological advances driving consumer needs.

These are just a few whose intellect, talent, and precocity have gained them prominence, not only in global history, but our futures. Time, it appears, will never dim brilliance.