Did you know that without George Westinghouse there wouldn't be any such elevators? Back when Edison was pushing D.C. they had a contest where Edison could only transmit enough power to go about five stories or so before the amperage got too high; it was Westinghouse's A.C. that broke through those barriers. But yes, Otis was awesome, and every major city in the world is possible because of his invention.
Good list, thanks, John. George Westinghouse actually deserves more credit for advancing Alternating Current than Tesla. Edison was aggressively promoting Direct Current, and it was Westinghouse who challenged and defeated his plans in a famous contest at the world's fair. Then he built the hydroelctric power station at Niagara Falls which consolidated the movement to AC power. While he collaborated with Westinghouse, Tesla had said that George Westinghouse was the only man who could have done that. Also, George Washington should be Number One on this list as there just wouldn't be an America without him.
If I had gone 100 deep, he would be in the list. I kind of wanted to stop at 75 because once you get beyond there, there are like 150 people that might be able to make a legit claim on one of those spots. The whole list is a little arbitrary, but it felt like it would have gotten extra arbitrary and more controversial because I am pretty sure Bill Gates and Robert E. Lee would have been in my next 25, too.
You forgot five. These guys are my personal heroes:
Marvin Heemeyer, aka Captain Killdozer. Built a homemade tank and wrecked his town over a zoning dispute.
David Hahn, aka The Radioactive Boy Scout. Built an unlicensed nuclear pile in his mom's tool shed and almost accidentally irradiated 50,000 people.
Billy Martin - MLB's greatest competitor and half the reason Ten-Cent Beer Night was AWESOME.
C.E. MIddlebrooks - Founder of Turbonique, the company that brought rocket technology to the masses. Inventor of rocket superchargers, rocket drag axles and bolt-on pure-thrust boosters that'd push go-karts to 200 mph.
And finally, Eugene Mulvihill, the founder and owner-proprietor of Action Park. That rarest and most American of heroes: A steel-cored lunatic who never got his head around the concept of "asking permission."
I did not forget him. He was a great war time President, but a disaster domestically who helped create the welfare state and extended the Depression for years with his dumb policies.
That's a bridge too far even for this list of criminals. He was a war-monger, a liar, a pro-communist, an enemy of fundamental rights under the Bill of Rights, personally corrupt, someone who packed the government with Communist spies, who was Stalin's lap poodle at Yalta, who committed horrific war crimes in his civilian bombing campaigns that killed millions of Germans. The list goes on and on. Perhaps the very worst President in American history rivalled only by Lincoln and Wilson.
I don't think he deliberately allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. There's lots of speculation, but I think it's much more likely they just caught us unaware.
Sherman the murderer! Oh my God, John. You can't be serious. Wow, what a list. Statism to the max. Susan B. Anthony? Really? As feminist as her buddy Stanton. Oh well, just goes to show that the America we all love is a really, really big tent. Until one day when it isn't. I wish could say that some of the people you mention are not the nucleus of tomorrow's tyranny, but I do believe some are.
How did Sherman clear land mines? Read Shelby Foote's history of the Civil War. Sherman cleared land mines by using captured Confederate soldiers as live mine detonators. He was such a sicko that he even wrote a gleeful letter about it to his wife. (Yes! His WIFE!) He told his wife that he sat astride his horse and watched as his men herded the Southern soldiers across the mines and couldn't help but LAUGH to see how gingerly the poor guys stepped. A chapter of American history that is carefully deleted in the patriotic nonsense we are taught that is designed to induce Americans to obey the government and support its wars without question. The Party will have to try the deviationist Hawkins before convicting him and packing him off to Siberia. Comrade S.
Don’t know, John. NONE of the Confederate generals stooped to sadism and wanton cruelty of Sherman. No one won the Civil War. The union was subverted and the South decimated for no reason other than Northern greed. We could have solved slavery like they did in Brazil.
But Andersonville prison, where 13,000 union prisoners died, probably far exceeds the number of sadistic deaths Sherman caused. The civil war will be debated forever, and I can see both sides of the argument. Especially as we edge closer to another one, if the Demoncats enact a bunch of their wish list programs! Thanks for posting this comment.
If we have another civil war, as I tell other Southerners, "This time WE need to have the Lincoln and THEY need to have the Jefferson Davis." Winning will be all that matters. We aren't dealing with opponents. We are dealing with people who hate us and want us dead. We will need to be as ruthless as their Lenin, "the god of the godless."
I'm gonna have to disagree. I'm glad the war was fought, glad the North won, and glad we were one country after. Theoretically, it could have been solved another way, but as a practical matter, it was fight or accept two nations. I think Lincoln made the hard, but right choice.
But, Hawkins, stop, consider and reflect: the United States was the only nation on earth that had to fight a civil war to end slavery. Every other nation managed to end slavery without killing 500,000 guys on the battlefield. Even Hispanic nations (for all that we Anglo-Saxons consider Latins to be excitable and unstable) like Venezuela and Brazil were able to handle this issue sensibly. Are we Americans are inferior to Brazilians and Venezuelans? Surely, smart guys ought to have been able to work things out without killing each other. The Civil War was not glorious - on either side. It was evidence of national failure.
It absolutely was a national failure and it shouldn't have come to that, but it did. You could say the same thing about WW1, WW2, the Cold War -- pretty much every war. There was a time when wars made economic sense, but today, both sides would almost always be better off talking things out than going to war. What's happening in Iran right now is a great example of that. We're winning for sure and I am guessing Trump feels like it's, "Bomb or the nutjobs that want to kill us or they get nukes," but we'd be better off if we weren't doing it and Iran could actually be a prosperous regional power instead of a bombed out wreck right now if they gave up on killing us and the Israelis, but that isn't how it played out. I really wish the North and South could have talked it out, but Americans spent decades choking on slavery and the consequences of it before Lincoln ever became President and we couldn't do it. Eventually, it was fight or split and talking wasn't going to change that.
You were just on a role when you wrote "I'm glad the war was fought." You didn't mean it the way you said it. No sensible, decent person (and while we sometimes disagree I know you are a sensible, decent person) could be glad the war was fought. I'm a Southerner's Southerner. I can trump most other Southerners in credentials. There's a Confederate bond framed and posted by the exterior door from my house that features my paternal cousin Doushka* Pickens' face on it. She was the daughter of S.C. Governor Pickens and lit the fuse for the first cannon shot at Fort Sumter. But unlike a lot of my fellow Southerners I do not think the war was glorious. I think it was a catastrophic and idiotic mistake on both sides. Surely, guys with good sense should have been able to sit down at a table and resolve matters short of 500,000 Americans of British descent killing each other. I strongly disagree with you about Lincoln. Like so many supposedly "great" war time leaders, he was awful. He, more than anyone else, bears responsibility for the stupid war. The greatest calamity of his calamitous life was when he refused, as they requested, to help Southern Unionists avert secession when he - alone in the nation - KNEW he would initiate a war if they seceded. Like so many others including Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill he has been mistakenly made into an icon when, if the truth be known, Lincoln like the other 3 played a terrible road in history. Hawkins: had you been alive in 1861-1865 I would not have wanted to shoot you. And I feel the same way about most others from the North.
* I meant to add an explanation of how Cousin Doushka got her Slavic first name. Her father was American ambassador to the Tsar when she was born. Her name means "Little Girl" in Russian. When the Tsar saw her and said "Doushka", her father decided that would be her name.
In a perfect world, there would be no wars. But, the real world, it's often wars or an intolerable status quo. The choice was war or the America splitting into a free and slave half. Maybe they should have been able to come up with something else, but they didn't and they likely couldn't have. So, given the choices, as awful as it was, I'm glad our we had the war and that Lincoln was the man who won it.
Democratic and Progressist = feminist senator Graham Platner,since a long time promoting "Beleive the women" and " #Me Too" movement is accused of rape by Jenny Radicot his long time girlfriend !
That could change many things in " The sex War" enlighting poliicians and women ' falsehoods used against Men !
The anti-Party saboteur has omitted President Polk, the greatest American President who managed to overcome the antipatriotic opposition of Abraham Lincoln and others to lead America to victory over Mexico and to almost double the size of our country.
Comrade Hawkins has included so many wreckers and traitors as to boggle the mind...the whole list of "Civil Rights" leaders. A list of those born for the gallows.
He has even named Earnest Hemingway - a spy for Stalin who continued to spy for the Soviet Union until he finally did the right thing and committed suicide in Cuba in the early 1960s.
Clarence Thomas also deserves a spot on that list.
I think Elijah Otis deserves a spot. His invention of the elevator safety brake allowed buildings to exceed 10 stories.
Did you know that without George Westinghouse there wouldn't be any such elevators? Back when Edison was pushing D.C. they had a contest where Edison could only transmit enough power to go about five stories or so before the amperage got too high; it was Westinghouse's A.C. that broke through those barriers. But yes, Otis was awesome, and every major city in the world is possible because of his invention.
Would like to add Tom Clancy, John Steinbeck and Edgar Rice Burroughs to the writers section of this list.
You can tell Clancy was never in the military because his heroes are always OFFICERS.
I know he wasn't, but I still like his work.
Is there a seat available for contemporary authors of value positive literature? Asking for a friend.
Good list, thanks, John. George Westinghouse actually deserves more credit for advancing Alternating Current than Tesla. Edison was aggressively promoting Direct Current, and it was Westinghouse who challenged and defeated his plans in a famous contest at the world's fair. Then he built the hydroelctric power station at Niagara Falls which consolidated the movement to AC power. While he collaborated with Westinghouse, Tesla had said that George Westinghouse was the only man who could have done that. Also, George Washington should be Number One on this list as there just wouldn't be an America without him.
Admiral Chester Nimitz belongs on the list
If I had gone 100 deep, he would be in the list. I kind of wanted to stop at 75 because once you get beyond there, there are like 150 people that might be able to make a legit claim on one of those spots. The whole list is a little arbitrary, but it felt like it would have gotten extra arbitrary and more controversial because I am pretty sure Bill Gates and Robert E. Lee would have been in my next 25, too.
You forgot five. These guys are my personal heroes:
Marvin Heemeyer, aka Captain Killdozer. Built a homemade tank and wrecked his town over a zoning dispute.
David Hahn, aka The Radioactive Boy Scout. Built an unlicensed nuclear pile in his mom's tool shed and almost accidentally irradiated 50,000 people.
Billy Martin - MLB's greatest competitor and half the reason Ten-Cent Beer Night was AWESOME.
C.E. MIddlebrooks - Founder of Turbonique, the company that brought rocket technology to the masses. Inventor of rocket superchargers, rocket drag axles and bolt-on pure-thrust boosters that'd push go-karts to 200 mph.
And finally, Eugene Mulvihill, the founder and owner-proprietor of Action Park. That rarest and most American of heroes: A steel-cored lunatic who never got his head around the concept of "asking permission."
You forgot FDR.
I did not forget him. He was a great war time President, but a disaster domestically who helped create the welfare state and extended the Depression for years with his dumb policies.
That's a bridge too far even for this list of criminals. He was a war-monger, a liar, a pro-communist, an enemy of fundamental rights under the Bill of Rights, personally corrupt, someone who packed the government with Communist spies, who was Stalin's lap poodle at Yalta, who committed horrific war crimes in his civilian bombing campaigns that killed millions of Germans. The list goes on and on. Perhaps the very worst President in American history rivalled only by Lincoln and Wilson.
The guy who goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor to take domestic attention off his New Deal, which prolonged the Depression?
I don't think he deliberately allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. There's lots of speculation, but I think it's much more likely they just caught us unaware.
Sherman the murderer! Oh my God, John. You can't be serious. Wow, what a list. Statism to the max. Susan B. Anthony? Really? As feminist as her buddy Stanton. Oh well, just goes to show that the America we all love is a really, really big tent. Until one day when it isn't. I wish could say that some of the people you mention are not the nucleus of tomorrow's tyranny, but I do believe some are.
How did Sherman clear land mines? Read Shelby Foote's history of the Civil War. Sherman cleared land mines by using captured Confederate soldiers as live mine detonators. He was such a sicko that he even wrote a gleeful letter about it to his wife. (Yes! His WIFE!) He told his wife that he sat astride his horse and watched as his men herded the Southern soldiers across the mines and couldn't help but LAUGH to see how gingerly the poor guys stepped. A chapter of American history that is carefully deleted in the patriotic nonsense we are taught that is designed to induce Americans to obey the government and support its wars without question. The Party will have to try the deviationist Hawkins before convicting him and packing him off to Siberia. Comrade S.
War is Hell and Sherman was a revolutionary general who played a big part of winning the Civil War. He's one of the best generals America ever had.
Don’t know, John. NONE of the Confederate generals stooped to sadism and wanton cruelty of Sherman. No one won the Civil War. The union was subverted and the South decimated for no reason other than Northern greed. We could have solved slavery like they did in Brazil.
But Andersonville prison, where 13,000 union prisoners died, probably far exceeds the number of sadistic deaths Sherman caused. The civil war will be debated forever, and I can see both sides of the argument. Especially as we edge closer to another one, if the Demoncats enact a bunch of their wish list programs! Thanks for posting this comment.
If we have another civil war, as I tell other Southerners, "This time WE need to have the Lincoln and THEY need to have the Jefferson Davis." Winning will be all that matters. We aren't dealing with opponents. We are dealing with people who hate us and want us dead. We will need to be as ruthless as their Lenin, "the god of the godless."
I'm gonna have to disagree. I'm glad the war was fought, glad the North won, and glad we were one country after. Theoretically, it could have been solved another way, but as a practical matter, it was fight or accept two nations. I think Lincoln made the hard, but right choice.
But, Hawkins, stop, consider and reflect: the United States was the only nation on earth that had to fight a civil war to end slavery. Every other nation managed to end slavery without killing 500,000 guys on the battlefield. Even Hispanic nations (for all that we Anglo-Saxons consider Latins to be excitable and unstable) like Venezuela and Brazil were able to handle this issue sensibly. Are we Americans are inferior to Brazilians and Venezuelans? Surely, smart guys ought to have been able to work things out without killing each other. The Civil War was not glorious - on either side. It was evidence of national failure.
It absolutely was a national failure and it shouldn't have come to that, but it did. You could say the same thing about WW1, WW2, the Cold War -- pretty much every war. There was a time when wars made economic sense, but today, both sides would almost always be better off talking things out than going to war. What's happening in Iran right now is a great example of that. We're winning for sure and I am guessing Trump feels like it's, "Bomb or the nutjobs that want to kill us or they get nukes," but we'd be better off if we weren't doing it and Iran could actually be a prosperous regional power instead of a bombed out wreck right now if they gave up on killing us and the Israelis, but that isn't how it played out. I really wish the North and South could have talked it out, but Americans spent decades choking on slavery and the consequences of it before Lincoln ever became President and we couldn't do it. Eventually, it was fight or split and talking wasn't going to change that.
You were just on a role when you wrote "I'm glad the war was fought." You didn't mean it the way you said it. No sensible, decent person (and while we sometimes disagree I know you are a sensible, decent person) could be glad the war was fought. I'm a Southerner's Southerner. I can trump most other Southerners in credentials. There's a Confederate bond framed and posted by the exterior door from my house that features my paternal cousin Doushka* Pickens' face on it. She was the daughter of S.C. Governor Pickens and lit the fuse for the first cannon shot at Fort Sumter. But unlike a lot of my fellow Southerners I do not think the war was glorious. I think it was a catastrophic and idiotic mistake on both sides. Surely, guys with good sense should have been able to sit down at a table and resolve matters short of 500,000 Americans of British descent killing each other. I strongly disagree with you about Lincoln. Like so many supposedly "great" war time leaders, he was awful. He, more than anyone else, bears responsibility for the stupid war. The greatest calamity of his calamitous life was when he refused, as they requested, to help Southern Unionists avert secession when he - alone in the nation - KNEW he would initiate a war if they seceded. Like so many others including Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill he has been mistakenly made into an icon when, if the truth be known, Lincoln like the other 3 played a terrible road in history. Hawkins: had you been alive in 1861-1865 I would not have wanted to shoot you. And I feel the same way about most others from the North.
* I meant to add an explanation of how Cousin Doushka got her Slavic first name. Her father was American ambassador to the Tsar when she was born. Her name means "Little Girl" in Russian. When the Tsar saw her and said "Doushka", her father decided that would be her name.
In a perfect world, there would be no wars. But, the real world, it's often wars or an intolerable status quo. The choice was war or the America splitting into a free and slave half. Maybe they should have been able to come up with something else, but they didn't and they likely couldn't have. So, given the choices, as awful as it was, I'm glad our we had the war and that Lincoln was the man who won it.
Big news today in The Free Press (08/07/2026)
Democratic and Progressist = feminist senator Graham Platner,since a long time promoting "Beleive the women" and " #Me Too" movement is accused of rape by Jenny Radicot his long time girlfriend !
That could change many things in " The sex War" enlighting poliicians and women ' falsehoods used against Men !
Gad! Who could have believed it?
Comrade Hawkins has betrayed the Revolution!
The anti-Party saboteur has omitted President Polk, the greatest American President who managed to overcome the antipatriotic opposition of Abraham Lincoln and others to lead America to victory over Mexico and to almost double the size of our country.
Comrade Hawkins has included so many wreckers and traitors as to boggle the mind...the whole list of "Civil Rights" leaders. A list of those born for the gallows.
He has even named Earnest Hemingway - a spy for Stalin who continued to spy for the Soviet Union until he finally did the right thing and committed suicide in Cuba in the early 1960s.
Beyond belief!
I can't stand it any longer.
I'm going to bed.
Comrade S
Polk and Monroe would have definitely made the next 25.