Every so often, an improbable number of extraordinary people were together at once.
Why there? Why then?
In roughly one century, one city-state produced the founders of philosophy, drama, history, and democratic politics. Source: Fifth-century Athens.
Pericles Socrates Plato Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides Aristophanes Herodotus Thucydides Phidias
Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to paint battle scenes on opposite walls of the same council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio, while Machiavelli served in the same government and the young Raphael traveled to Florence to study them both. Source: The Battle of Anghiari.
Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo Machiavelli Raphael
The early Royal Society put the founders of modern science in one room. Not merely contemporaries: they were corresponding, fighting, presenting experiments and meeting through the Society. Halley famously visited Newton and asked him what orbit a planet would follow if gravity diminished with the square of distance. Newton effectively replied: an ellipse. That conversation helped trigger the writing of the Principia. Source: Royal Society.
Isaac Newton Robert Hooke Christopher Wren Robert Boyle Edmond Halley John Flamsteed
The Lunar Society met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon, for light to ride home by: a dinner club that helped drive the Industrial Revolution. Source: The Lunar Men.
Erasmus Darwin Matthew Boulton James Watt Joseph Priestley Josiah Wedgwood
The founders of modern economics, geology, chemistry, and sociology all worked in one city of about fifty thousand, many in the same clubs. A visitor, the King's chemist, remarked: "Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand." Source: Scottish Enlightenment.
David Hume Adam Smith James Hutton Joseph Black Adam Ferguson
Thirteen colonies of about 2.5 million people put the founders into the same rooms, one statehouse producing the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution eleven years later. Source: Founding Brothers.
Benjamin Franklin George Washington Thomas Jefferson John Adams James Madison Alexander Hamilton
In Montparnasse, Hemingway could walk into Shakespeare and Company and encounter writers who would define twentieth-century literature, and the same faces drank in places like La Rotonde, Le Dôme and La Closerie des Lilas. This wasn't "they all lived in Paris." They knew each other. Source: Lost Generation.
Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald James Joyce Gertrude Stein Pablo Picasso Ezra Pound T. S. Eliot Man Ray Salvador Dalí Luis Buñuel Cole Porter Sylvia Beach
The fifth Solvay Conference gathered 29 physicists to debate the newly formulated quantum theory. Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel laureates. Source: Solvay Conference.
Albert Einstein Niels Bohr Marie Curie Max Planck Paul Dirac Werner Heisenberg Wolfgang Pauli Erwin Schrödinger Louis de Broglie
Oppenheimer deliberately gathered many of the world's leading physicists on an isolated mesa in New Mexico. Hans Bethe ran theoretical physics; Richard Feynman worked under him; Edward Teller was there; Enrico Fermi and others moved through the project. They lived together, argued together and built the first atomic weapons. Oppenheimer's house itself became a social gathering point, with Feynman and Teller among the guests at his parties. Source: Manhattan Project.
J. Robert Oppenheimer Enrico Fermi Hans Bethe Richard Feynman Edward Teller John von Neumann
One industrial laboratory produced the transistor (1947), information theory (1948), the solar cell (1954), and foundational work on the laser, and later Unix and the C programming language. Ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed there. Source: Bell Labs.
Claude Shannon William Shockley John Bardeen Walter Brattain Ken Thompson Dennis Ritchie
In one research center in Palo Alto, Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, Bob Metcalfe and their colleagues developed or pioneered the Alto personal computer, graphical interfaces, Ethernet, laser printing, networked computing and much of the conceptual architecture of modern personal computing. PARC researchers describe the Alto as the combined product of the group rather than one inventor. Source: Xerox PARC.
Alan Kay Butler Lampson Chuck Thacker Bob Metcalfe David Boggs Adele Goldberg
In 1957, eight young scientists, the "traitorous eight," quit William Shockley's laboratory to found Fairchild Semiconductor; their alumni founded Intel, AMD, and Kleiner Perkins. In 1975–76 the Homebrew Computer Club produced the Apple I. In 1998, two Stanford PhD students founded Google in a Menlo Park garage. In the 2000s, the "PayPal mafia" went on to found or fund Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, and Palantir: one valley, five overlapping generations of builders. Sources: Traitorous eight, Homebrew Computer Club, PayPal Mafia.
Robert Noyce Gordon Moore Steve Jobs Steve Wozniak Larry Page Sergey Brin Peter Thiel Elon Musk
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