When I was a kid my dad showed us the movie Gettysburg.
We watched as the 20th Maine Regiment took their position on the far
left flank. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain was told that he and his troops had one
goal: “Hold the line.” If the 20th fell, the Confederate Army would
be able to circle around and overwhelm the Union troops, likely winning the
battle that is now widely recognized as the turning point of the Civil War.
As the Confederate troops battered the left flank and it
looked like his troops would be overtaken, Chamberlain, who just two years
earlier was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, ordered his troops to
draw their bayonets. His men charged downhill, met the Confederates…and held the
line.
Ida B Wells was an investigative journalist in Memphis in
the Jim Crow era. When her friends were murdered by a white mob for operating a
successful grocery store, Wells decided to expose the truth about lynching in
America. She challenged the myth that the black people being lynched were
rapists and criminals and instead asserted that the motives behind lynchings were
largely economic and political.
Wells collected the data and proved her findings in fourteen
pages of statistics in The Red Record. Even after her newspaper office
was burned down and her own life was threatened, she continued speaking out and
raising awareness in America and England, fundamentally changing the debate
around lynching in the United States.
When man landed on the moon it was partly because of a woman
sitting at her computer. Margaret Hamilton led the software team that wrote the
code for the Apollo missions. Hamilton realized at one point that the software for
the display system was synchronous—it would not allow one display to interrupt
another. But what if there was an emergency? She wanted the software to be able
to interrupt a normal display and to be able to tell the astronauts what the
emergency was and what their options were in response.
Hamilton was told it couldn’t be done. The algorithm was
impossible. She stayed up all night, solved the “impossible” problem and the
new software was installed. Minutes before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, alarms
went off in the lunar lander and Mission Control had to make a decision whether
or not to go on. Had they not known the reason behind the alarm they may have
aborted but the codes on Hamilton’s display told them that there was just a
switch in the wrong position. Mission Control said, “Go” and 500 million people
watched a human being walk on the moon.
A professor, a journalist, a computer scientist…they are the
extraordinary and ordinary people who have changed our world. It makes me
wonder who it will be today. I think it’s best if we all strive to live like it
could be us and therefore take heed of the examples of their conviction. They
saw what was true and what was necessary and, facing naysayers, angry mobs and
charging men with muskets…they held the line.
