Genius or circumstance
Famous explorers and inventors are usually remembered as brilliant individuals. Historians are more cautious. The same person born a century earlier, or in a different country, might never have achieved anything worth remembering. How significant pioneers, innovators and developers turn out to be depends heavily on the time and place in which they work.
Nineteenth-century America makes a good test case. Within a few generations the USA sent explorers across the continent, filled the West with settlers, and produced the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the sewing machine and the telephone. That burst of activity can be explained in two competing ways.
- The individual explanation. These people succeeded because of personal qualities such as curiosity, courage and stubborn hard work.
- The contextual explanation. They succeeded because 19th-century America gave them freedom, resources, partners and customers.
Three cases help to weigh these explanations: the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the inventor Thomas Edison, and the inventor Josephine Cochrane. Each shows a different mix of personal drive and favourable or unfavourable conditions. Together they support a judgement on how far pioneers and innovators are products of their time and place.
The key concept here is significance. Something is historically significant when it caused deep, lasting change. A useful test is to ask whether the change would still have happened without that particular person, at that particular time.
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