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From unsung heroes to accidental revolutionaries, ordinary individuals have shaped our world in extraordinary ways. Join us as we explore remarkable people who altered the course of history through courage, innovation, and sometimes just being in the right place at the right time. Which everyday hero's story inspires you most?
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00:00Principe finally found acceptance in a secret Serbian society, the Black Hand.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we'll be looking at everyday people who changed the course of history.
00:12Soon, anyone with a computer, modem, and a telephone line can create their own webpage.
00:19Number 10. Ignaz Zemmelweis
00:22Victorian hospitals were far from flawless healing places and struggled with high maternal mortality rates
00:27because doctors didn't wash their hands.
00:29A Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Zemmelweis tried to change that.
00:33Years before the germ theory of disease was developed, the Viennese physician Ignaz Zemmelweis
00:38came to the startling discovery that doctors could save the lives of patients simply by washing their hands.
00:44In the 1840s, he realized that disinfecting hands between patients helped stop infections from spreading.
00:49After he put this into practice, his clinic's maternal mortality rate dropped from about 18% to below 2%.
00:55He ordered the students to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before each examination.
01:01The mortality rate fell from 18% to 1%.
01:04Unfortunately, most of his contemporaries still weren't convinced.
01:08In 1865, Zemmelweis had a nervous breakdown.
01:11He was sent to a mental institution where he was physically abused and eventually died.
01:14It's a tragic story, but at least his ideas were eventually accepted and saved many lives.
01:18Help me to show my mind.
01:21Help me to show my mind.
01:21Show me, but somewhere else.
01:23Number 9. Frank Wills
01:25This man helped bring down one of the most powerful figures in the world simply by doing his job.
01:32On June 17th, 1972, Frank Wills was working as a security guard at the Watergate complex in the U.S. Capitol.
01:38That night, he discovered signs of a break-in, called the police and set off the Watergate scandal.
01:43No one imagined then that what has been called a third-rate burglary could ever lead to the downfall of the President of the United States.
01:51It turned out a group connected to President Nixon was trying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
01:56Two years later, Nixon stepped down as President because of the incident.
01:59Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
02:04Sadly, Wills spent the rest of his life struggling to find steady work and lived with very little money.
02:09Number 8. Rosalind Franklin
02:11Nowadays, we take our knowledge of DNA for granted.
02:14It's a fairly recent discovery largely influenced by Rosalind Franklin, who lived from 1920 until 1958.
02:20She wanted to be a scientist ever since she was a teenager, which wasn't a common or easy career path for girls at that time.
02:27Despite her short life, she revolutionized biology.
02:30Unfortunately, her work was frequently overlooked until after her death.
02:34One of her biggest achievements was Photo 51, an X-ray image of DNA fibers captured by a student of hers.
02:39Just getting the image took 100 hours.
02:42The calculations necessary to analyze it would take a year.
02:45This provided crucial evidence of DNA's double helix structure.
02:48Franklin almost certainly would have won a Nobel Prize.
02:51Her colleagues did.
02:51The journal published the manuscripts together, but put Franklin's last,
02:56making it look like her experiments just confirmed Watson and Crick's breakthrough, instead of inspiring it.
03:02The reason she didn't is that she died before it was awarded, and Nobel Prizes are generally not given posthumously.
03:08Number 7. Rachel Carson
03:10For centuries, books have proven themselves to be extremely influential on humanity.
03:14One example is Silent Spring by Rachel Carslin, an environmental science book discussing the use of pesticides.
03:20Up to now, 500,000 copies have been sold, and Silent Spring has been called the most controversial book of the year.
03:27It revealed how devastating pesticides can be, specifically focusing on the chemical compound DDT.
03:33This was decades before mainstream awareness of environmental conservation's importance.
03:37Biologists with the Fish and Wildlife Service begin to see pretty quickly that when DDT is used in certain areas,
03:44there's evidence of problems. There's evidence of fish kill or bird kill.
03:47Carson showed how these chemicals were seriously impacting the environment, harming bees, birds, fish, and water sources.
03:53The book was so influential that it helped lead to the banning of DDT in the U.S.,
03:57despite huge opposition from the chemical companies.
04:00Carson's work was a key factor in inspiring the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
04:05Unless we do bring these chemicals under better control, we are certainly headed for disaster.
04:11Number 6. Harriet Tubman
04:12Born in 1822, Tubman lived through an extremely challenging period for black people in the United States.
04:18She was born a slave in the state of Maryland, which, as you can expect, made her childhood horrific.
04:23She had to be more or less obedient to her master.
04:27They told her when to go to bed, when to get up, when to work, and such.
04:31And she had a rebellious spirit, and she said that slavery was against the law of God.
04:38Thankfully, in 1849, she successfully ran away to Philadelphia.
04:42She then spent the rest of her life saving others from the terrors of slavery.
04:45She was a very courageous and brave woman as she, you know, in turn escaped from slavery and then went back to help others do the same.
04:56Tubman became one of the most prominent members of the Underground Railroad, earning her the nickname Moses of her people.
05:01She went on to become a hero of the Union Army during the Civil War and lived until 1913.
05:06The youngest person to receive a Nobel Prize is Malala Yousafzai, who was given the award in 2014 at just 17 years old.
05:25When the Taliban tried to take control of her homeland in the late 2000s, they banned girls from attending school.
05:37She was only 11, but that didn't stop her from becoming a courageous activist.
05:41Her activism upset the radical Taliban, leading to constant death threats.
05:44In October 2012, Taliban members intercepted her school bus and shot her in the head.
05:55She woke up a few days later in a hospital in Birmingham, England.
05:58When I opened my eyes, I did not know where I was.
06:04After recovering, she founded the Malala Fund, a charity advocating for female education globally.
06:09Her heroic activism earned her the Nobel Prize a couple of years later.
06:13Let this be the last time that we see a child out of school.
06:20Let this end with us.
06:22Let's begin this ending together, today, right here, right now.
06:30Number 4. Stanislav Petrov
06:32During the Cold War, the world was constantly in fear of imminent nuclear war.
06:36One man who overcame that fear and possibly saved the world as a result was Stanislav Petrov.
06:41On September 26th, 1983, the USSR's ICBM warning system detected multiple incoming American missiles.
06:56Instead of immediately alerting his superiors, which could have triggered a massive retaliatory strike,
07:01Petrov waited for additional evidence.
07:04If his intuition was wrong, the Soviet Union would have been in trouble.
07:12Thankfully, he was right.
07:13The warning system had malfunctioned and there was no threat.
07:15Sadly, he wasn't rewarded for saving humanity.
07:26Instead, he was reassigned to a lower-stakes position and retired early,
07:29partly because Soviet leaders didn't want to draw attention to the system failure.
07:33Number 3. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
07:42You can thank Tim Berners-Lee for being able to watch this video.
07:45That's because in 1989, he invented the World Wide Web while working for CERN.
07:49The first two years were a very hard slog trying to persuade people that hypertext was not going to be too complicated,
07:56that this really would be very interesting and there would be material on it,
07:59that it was worth putting your material out because there would be people who used the browsers.
08:03It was worth installing a browser because even though the material that was out there wasn't that exciting,
08:08that there was more material coming.
08:10He wanted to create an online repository for information which fellow researchers could access wherever and whenever.
08:15As we all know by now, it was one of the most influential inventions in human history.
08:20Computers, databases, and consumer electronics, designed to put vast amounts of information at users' fingertips.
08:27This got him knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 alongside tons of other honors and awards.
08:32That's extremely impressive for someone who learned electronics from toy trains as a child.
08:36The web is really basically a very, very simple idea, very simple.
08:39Number 2. Claudette Colvin
08:41Almost everybody knows Rosa Parks, the hero who refused to give up her seat on the bus
08:45to a white person during a time of extreme racial segregation in Alabama.
08:49Before Parks, there was Claudette Colvin.
08:51It felt like Harriet Tubman was holding me down.
08:55Hands were holding me down on one shoulder.
08:58And Sojourner Truth, hands were holding me down on another shoulder.
09:02Only nine months before Parks' arrest, Colvin, just 15 years old at the time,
09:06was arrested in Alabama for refusing to relinquish her seat.
09:09Most people ask me, were you afraid?
09:12When I was a teenager, I was afraid, but I was more angry at these white passioners.
09:20She went on to become one of the four primary plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gale case,
09:24which challenged bus segregation laws.
09:26Her side succeeded, and the courts declared transport segregation laws were unconstitutional.
09:31Because she was young, unmarried, and pregnant, Colvin didn't become as widely known as Parks.
09:35I just wanted people to come together and unify and fight the segregation.
09:42Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about
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09:57Number 1. Gavrilo Princip
09:59Many scholars considered World War I to have been largely inevitable,
10:04regardless of whether Franz Ferdinand survived the assassination attempt.
10:07These two elements of imbalance of power, of inequality between those who have and those
10:14who have not, between those who are running the show and those who feel that they ought to
10:19be running the show, produce this amazing sense of an approaching storm in 1914.
10:26By 1914, Europe was divided into two major alliance blocs,
10:30with huge nationalistic and imperial rivalries between them.
10:34Despite this fact, no one can deny that Ferdinand's death was a catalyst for war.
10:38In June 1914, the Bosnian-Serb Gavrilo Princip shot Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
10:44At 11 a.m., a wrong turn by the Archduke's driver brought the heir to the Austrian throne
10:50face to face with Gavrilo Princip.
10:53Austria-Hungary issued a brutal ultimatum to Serbia, but were worried about their Russian allies,
10:58so they got Germany to back them up.
11:00Eventually, this domino effect continued until most of Europe was at war.
11:04In a flash, the whole continent was going to be at war.
11:08Princip was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but died aged 23 in April 1918,
11:13only a few months before the war's conclusion.
11:16Did we forget to mention any other average Joes who made a huge mark on history?
11:20Let us know in the comments section.
11:22I will continue this fight until I see every child, every child in school.
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