Top 10 Normal People Who Changed History Forever

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today well be looking at everyday people who changed the course of history.

#10: Ignaz Semmelweis

Victorian hospitals were far from flawless healing places and struggled with high maternal mortality rates because doctors didnt wash their hands. A Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis tried to change that. In the 1840s, he realized that disinfecting hands between patients helped stop infections from spreading. After he put this into practice, his clinics maternal mortality rate dropped from about 18% to below 2%. Unfortunately, most of his contemporaries still werent convinced. In 1865, Semmelweis had a nervous breakdown. He was sent to a mental institution, where he was physically abused and eventually died. Its a tragic story, but at least his ideas were eventually accepted and saved many lives.

#9: Frank Wills

This man helped bring down one of the most powerful figures in the world, simply by doing his job. On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills was working as a security guard at the Watergate complex in the U.S. capital. That night, he discovered signs of a break-in, called the police, and set off the Watergate scandal. It turned out a group connected to President Nixon was trying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Two years later, Nixon stepped down as president because of the incident. Sadly, Wills spent the rest of his life struggling to find steady work and lived with very little money.

#8: Rosalind Franklin

Nowadays, we take our knowledge of DNA for granted. Its a fairly recent discovery, largely influenced by Rosalind Franklin, who lived from 1920 until 1958. Despite her short life, she revolutionized biology. Unfortunately, her work was frequently overlooked until after her death. One of her biggest achievements was Photo 51, an X-ray image of DNA fibers captured by a student of hers. This provided crucial evidence of DNAs double helix structure. Franklin almost certainly wouldve won a Nobel Prizeher colleagues did. The reason she didn't is that she died before it was awarded, and Nobel Prizes are generally not given posthumously.

#7: Rachel Carson

For centuries, books have proven themselves to be extremely influential on humanity. One example is Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, an environmental science book discussing the use of pesticides. It revealed how devastating pesticides can be, specifically focusing on the chemical compound DDT. This was decades before mainstream awareness of environmental conservations importance. Carson showed how these chemicals were seriously impacting the environmentharming bees, birds, fish, and water sources. The book was so influential that it helped lead to the banning of DDT in the US, despite huge opposition from chemical companies. Carsons work was a key factor in inspiring the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

#6: Harriet Tubman

Born in 1822, Tubman lived through an extremely challenging period for black people in the United States. She was born a slave in the state of Maryland, which, as you can expect, made her childhood horrific. Thankfully, in 1849, she successfully ran away to Philadelphia. She then spent the rest of her life saving others from the terrors of slavery. Tubman became one of the most prominent members of the Underground Railroad, earning her the nickname Moses of Her People. She went on to become a hero of the Union Army during the Civil War and lived until 1913.

#5: Malala Yousafzai

The youngest person to receive a Nobel Prize is Malala Yousafzai, who was given the award in 2014 at just 17 years old. When the Taliban tried to take control of her homeland in the late 2000s, they banned girls from attending school. She was only 11, but that didnt stop her from becoming a courageous activist. Her activism upset the radical Taliban, leading to constant death threats. In October 2012, Taliban members intercepted her school bus and shot her in the head. She woke up a few days later in a hospital in Birmingham, England. After recovering, she founded the Malala Fund, a charity advocating for female education globally. Her heroic activism earned her the Nobel Prize a couple of years later.

#4: Stanislav Petrov

During the Cold War, the world was constantly in fear of imminent nuclear war. One man who overcame that fearand possibly saved the world as a resultwas Stanislav Petrov. On September 26, 1983, the USSRs ICBM warning system detected multiple incoming American missiles. Instead of immediately alerting his superiors, which couldve triggered a massive retaliatory strike, Petrov waited for additional evidence. If his intuition was wrong, the Soviet Union wouldve been in trouble. Thankfully, he was rightthe warning system had malfunctioned, and there was no threat. Sadly, he wasnt rewarded for saving humanity. Instead, he was reassigned to a lower-stakes position and retired early, partly because Soviet leaders didnt want to draw attention to the system failure.

#3: Sir Tim Berners-Lee

You can thank Tim Berners-Lee for being able to watch this video. Thats because in 1989, he invented the World Wide Web while working for CERN. He wanted to create an online repository for information, which fellow researchers could access wherever and whenever. As we all know by now, it was one of the most influential inventions in human history. This got him knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004, alongside tons of other honors and awards. Thats extremely impressive for someone who learned electronics from toy trains as a child.

#2: Claudette Colvin

Almost everybody knows Rosa Parks, the hero who refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person during a time of extreme racial segregation in Alabama. Before Parks, there was Claudette Colvin. Only nine months before Parkss arrest, Colvin, just 15 years old at the time, was arrested in Alabama for refusing to relinquish her seat. She went on to become one of the four primary plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case, which challenged bus segregation laws. Her side succeeded, and the courts declared transport segregation laws were unconstitutional. Because she was young, unmarried, and pregnant, Colvin didnt become as widely known as Parks.

#1: Gavrilo Princip

Many scholars consider World War I to have been largely inevitable, regardless of whether Franz Ferdinand survived the assassination attempt. By 1914, Europe was divided into two major alliance blocks, with huge nationalistic and imperial rivalries between them. Despite this fact, no one can deny that Ferdinands death was a catalyst for war. In June 1914, the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip shot Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary issued a brutal ultimatum to Serbia, but were worried about their Russian alliesso they got Germany to back them up. Eventually, this domino effect continued until most of Europe was at war. Princip was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but died aged 23 in April 1918, only a few months before the wars conclusion.

Did we forget to mention any other average Joes who made a huge mark on history? Let us know in the comments section!