I love stories about people who saw the world differently – people who challenged everything society told them was true. These are the people who tend to change history.
At first, their ideas were dismissed as absurd, ridiculous and dangerous. Yet today, we take their discoveries, beliefs and courage for granted.
If you’ve ever been told to wash your hands before eating, you have Ignaz Semmelweis to thank. But in his lifetime, he wasn’t thanked – he was ridiculed.
Semmelweis was a Hungarian doctor in the mid-1800s who noticed something horrifying: Women in maternity wards were dying at an alarming rate from something called “childbed fever.” And in a baffling twist, women treated by doctors had a much higher mortality rate than those treated by midwives.
Semmelweis had a radical idea – maybe, just maybe, doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies. At the time, doctors would go straight from dissecting cadavers to delivering newborns without so much as rinsing off. Semmelweis implemented handwashing with a chlorinated solution in his hospital, and the mortality rate plummeted.
You’d think this discovery would be celebrated, right? Wrong. His peers mocked him and rejected his ideas, and he lost his hospital position. Frustrated and increasingly combative, he struggled to gain acceptance for his findings. Eventually, he was committed to an asylum, where he died after being severely beaten by guards.
It wasn’t until years later, with the rise of germ theory, that the medical community realized Semmelweis had been absolutely, unquestionably right.
If you could time-travel back to the late 1800s and tell people that one day, the entire world would be powered by invisible energy moving through the air, they’d probably lock you up. But one man already saw it coming – Nikola Tesla.
Tesla pioneered alternating current electricity, which is now the global standard, but at the time, many believed it was dangerous and impractical. He envisioned wireless communication, free energy and devices that could send information instantly across the globe. Sound familiar? It should – because today, we call that Wi-Fi and smartphones.
But Tesla was often overshadowed, sabotaged and financially ruined. His greatest rival waged a smear campaign against him, staging public electrocutions of animals to convince people that Tesla’s AC electricity was deadly.
Tesla’s dream of wireless energy transmission led him to build the Wardenclyffe Tower, an ambitious project to transmit electricity through the air. However, investors, including J.P. Morgan, pulled funding when they realized it wouldn’t be easily monetized.
By the time Tesla died, he was broke, alone and largely forgotten.
Today, Tesla’s work is the foundation of modern electrical power. Wireless charging, radio waves and even remote-controlled drones all trace back to his ideas. His name is now synonymous with innovation (thanks in part to a particular electric car company), but in his lifetime, people saw him as a mad scientist rather than the genius he truly was.
For decades, it was believed that most stomach ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Antacids and relaxation were thought to be the cure – but ulcers kept coming back. Enter Barry Marshall, a doctor who believed that bacteria, not just stress, was a major cause of stomach ulcers.
The idea seemed absurd – how could bacteria survive in the harsh acidity of the stomach? Research journals rejected his papers, and experts dismissed his findings as nonsense.
Frustrated, Marshall took matters into his own hands – literally.
In 1984, he drank a beaker full of H. pylori to prove his point. Within days, he developed severe gastritis, just as he predicted. A biopsy confirmed the presence of the bacteria, and antibiotics cured him completely.
Suddenly, the world had to take him seriously. His discovery led to a complete revolution in ulcer treatment, proving that many ulcers – though not all – could be cured with antibiotics.
In 2005, Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work.
The world has always belonged to those bold enough to challenge it. The ideas that shape the future often sound impossible at first.
If you have a belief, a dream or a vision that goes against the grain, take heart. The next significant breakthrough won’t come from someone who plays it safe – it might come from someone like you.
• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace,” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.