Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#44: William Gilbert (1544-1603)

William Gilbert was an English physicist and philosopher who was a pioneer of the scientific method.

Gilbert can be regard as a father of electrical engineering or electricity and magnetism. (He was one of the originators of the term "electricity"). In addition, he showed the Earth to be natural object, demonstrated the pervasiveness and simplicity of natural law, and believed that natural knowledge can be put to use to improve human life.

More important than his scientific findings, however, is the method by which he went about it. His work represented one of the first efforts to use experimentation, not merely to illustrate conclusions already reached by other means, but to test hypotheses and, consequently, to advance scientific knowledge.

Gilbert was representative of the type of individual who fueled the European Renaissance: Overall, he was motivated by truth, and consequently he followed facts wherever they may lead -- as opposed to clinging to dogmatic and preconceived notions, religious or secular.



Go to #45: Archimedes


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