We could call the era we live in the “information age,” or more clearly, the age of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. Whatever you think of the work of these men, their influence on our culture is undeniable. Had they lived a century ago, they might have said the same about Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald (who had not yet published The Information Age). The Great Gatsby (Not yet), Pablo Picasso and Charles Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud.
If we had lived in 1225, our lives would have overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, and Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.
All of this is laid out visually, A large map showing who was alive and whenIt was created earlier this year by a Reddit user called Profound_Whatever. Big Thinkof Frank Jacobs writeThe map reveals some surprising contemporaneities, such as how current US President Joe Biden “was contemporary for about a year with Nikola Tesla (1854-1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system used to distribute electricity.”
“Another, more recent (and more puzzling) overlap is with the life of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973). The Lord of the Ringsmatched Just a little Going back even further, how many of us were fully aware that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Martin Luther (1483–1546) were contemporaries of one another? Or that the lives of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and René Descartes (1596–1650) were almost perfectly synchronized, even though the one was the representative of dogmatic Puritans of the English Civil War and the other the father of modern rationalist philosophy, who questioned the central role of religion in the pursuit of truth?
A large map showing who was alive and when The book uses a color-coding system to divide the people whose lives were written into eight categories: artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Rube Goldberg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Darwin), “business and industry” (including famous pirates from Henry Morgan to Blackbeard), and “leaders and villains” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). It’s a reminder that we would do anything to meet some of these people, or to get in the way of others. Of course, the people we think defined certain historical periods were not always viewed that way by all who lived during those times. It doesn’t hurt to keep this in mind when considering our own place in history.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
