Life magazine

Life is a photo journalism magazine, founded by Henry Luce in 1936 (first issue dated November 23). Originally published weekly, Life became a monthly magazine in 1971 and ceased monthly publication in 2000. It is now published frequently as a special graphic paperback book, referred to by Life as a "megazine".

As of 2004 Life was owned by AOL Time Warner. Life publication's mission was "to see life; see the world". Life has presented some of the lasting iconic images of the world's notable events. Archival issues of Life are a source of photographic history.

Table of contents

1 List of Life magazine's 10 most important events of the last millennium
2 List of Life magazine's 100 most important people of the last millennium
3 External links

List of Life magazine's 10 most important events of the last millennium

Life magazine tried to rank the top 10 events of the millennium:

Bookprint (Johann Gutenberg, 1455)
Discovery of New World (Christopher Columbus, 1492)
A new major religion (Martin Luther, 1527)
Steam engine starts industrial revolution (James Watt, 1769)
Earth revolves around sun (Galileo Galilei, 1610)
Germ theory of disease (Louis Pasteur, 1864; Robert Koch,1876)
Gunpowder weapons (China, 1100)
Declaration of independence (US, 1776)
Adolf Hitler comes to power (1933)
Compass goes to sea (China, 1117)

This list has been criticised for being overly focused on Western achievements. For example, the Chinese also invented a variant of book print long before Gutenberg, and until the mid 18th century the bulk of the world's printed material was Chinese.

List of Life magazine's 100 most important people of the last millennium

The list above stands in odd contrast to another, even more criticised list of the US-magazine which unexpectedly placed Edison (a US inventor) first in the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years". Predictably, this has been dubbed overblown patriotism, since even during Edison's lifetime there were non-US inventors whose inventions (combustion engine, car, electricity-making machines, etc) had greater impact than Edison's. The top 100 list was further criticised for mixing world-famous people of humankind, such as Newton and Einstein and Luther and da Vinci, with numerous Americans largely unknown outside the US:

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