The Event of the Century

I've been trying to decide what was the most significant event on planet earth in the last 100 years. I'll explain why later. Anyway firstly I looked up Time Magazine because every year they nominate a person or idea which "for better or worse has most influenced events in the preceeding year", and found results of a Poll they took in 2000 on the "Event of the Century" . And Elvis got the most votes! Really!

Fortunately the Time Editors werent quite as shallow as the rest of the USA. They decided that in a century dominated by Science, the Person of the Century must be the pre-eminent Scientist, the man whose work gave rise to the Atom Bomb, the Big Bang, E=MC2,quantum physics and electronics, the really huge stuff in science : Albert Einstein. Just about everything else that happened, from the moon Landing - which was runner up in the Poll - or the discovery of Penicillin, or Television,the jet engine and airtravel,transistors and computers and the internet were all ultimately dependent on that great explosion of scientific discovery and endeavour. Lots of people thought Hitler should have been the man of the Century but the consensus was that time would steadily diminish the impact of his monstrous lifes work, whereas Einsteins would remain for ever.

There were heaps of other incredible things that happened that century : the civil rights movements, world war one and gas warfare, world war two and the Holocaust, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, helicopters,the Beatles,the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam and Agent Orange, Fidel Castro, the rise and fall of communism, JFK, discovery of the coelacanth,heart transplantation, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,insulin,Watson and Crick discovering the Double helix structure of DNA, discovery of Blood Groups, the immune system and antibodies, Teflon,plate tectonics,the Polio vaccine, the erradication of smallpox,the invention of nylon and PVC plastic, AIDS,radiocarbon dating, Bob Dylan,the Rolling Stones, Madonna,Woodstock, drugs for leukemia and schizophrenia,the Human Genome,lasers,Nelson Mandela,mobile phones, personal computers....on and on it goes.Has there ever been a greater century?

And for me personally,the most important thing that happened exactly one hundered years ago, while all this was waiting to happen, was that in Scotland my Dad was born on 9th September 1908.