Innovators who shaped the modern world

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, December 31st.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: remembering notable inventors and innovators.

But first, we want to spend some time remembering one of our own who died this year, our founder, Joel Belz, on February 4th. Joel launched It’s God’s World in 1981, and then eventually WORLD Magazine. And he oversaw the growth of WORLD over the decades into the organization it is today.

REICHARD: Following Joel’s death, many of our own journalists paid tribute to him—some in print, some online, and Kim Henderson put together a beautiful remembrance for this podcast. We’ll provide a link to all those resources in the transcript for today’s program. Living treasure by Lynn Vincent
Learning from Joel by Kevin Martin
Joel Belz—1941–2024
His Father’s world by Kim Henderson
The story seeker by Leigh Jones
Marveling at what God built by Kim Henderson
Well done, good and faithful servant by Lynde Langdon, Kim Henderson, and Lauren Dunn

Outside of WORLD, many other leaders in business and science also died.

EICHER: Here’s WORLD reporter Mary Muncy.

MARY MUNCY: First up, Bill Post, the inventor of a middle schooler’s favorite breakfast.

COMMERCIAL: Kellogg's Pop Tarts…

Post was a baker in the 60s when he got a call from Kellogg. In an interview with Fox, he said the company wanted a pastry for the toaster.

So they started work, but trying to get one test product through a 300-foot oven was not easy.

POST: So we had a lot of scrap and debris going through the oven. We sorted them out and let all the debris go to the pig farmer. The pig farmer was the happiest guy in the whole deal.

And maybe Post’s kids. They were 9 and 13 at the time and he brought home test products for them. At first, they were not good, but just a few months later the first Pop Tarts hit the shelves in Ohio and sold out almost immediately.

Post says he ate Pop Tarts a few times a week until his death on February 10th at age 96.

Next, two people who made modern technology possible: Herbert Kroemer and Robert Dennard.

HERBERT KROEMER: I’ve always liked to take ideas to the extreme, fully realizing that this extreme might not be reachable.

Herbert Kroemer won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for discovering the technology for modern semiconductors. They conduct electricity under some conditions and block it under others and are in everything from your cell phone to your car.

He told Vega Science that when he first tried to make one, it did not go well, so he shelved the idea until the 60s when technology started to catch up to his ideas. When it did, he filed a patent. But it expired in 1985 before there were any significant commercial uses.

KROEMER: I did make more money out of this patent than anybody else. I got 100 dollars for having submitted it.

Meanwhile, Robert Dennard was devising a way to store data in something smaller than the hulking computers of the 60s.

He told IBM Research that as a kid, he was good at math and science, but he was much more interested in climbing trees and dunking his cat in the pond.

Nevertheless, his high school guidance counselor said he should try engineering and by 1966 he was working with IBM trying to shrink data storage. He was sitting at home when it hit him.

DENNARD: I called up my boss and I said I’ve really developed great new memory technology for the future. He told me to take two aspirin and call him in the morning.

He eventually convinced his boss that storing data in fewer capacitors and transistors was possible. By the mid-70s what’s now known as DRAM was in almost every personal computer.

Dennard died on April 23 at age 91 and Herbert Kroemer died on March 8 at age 95.

AUDIO: [Sound of foxes]

Next, the woman who systematized domesticating foxes. Lyudmila Trut was 25 when she agreed to head an experiment in Russia that studied the process of domestication.

TRUT: [Speaking Russian] We formed a select group brought in from farms all over the USSR for crossbreeding. Then out of their offspring, we selected all the calmest cubs. And we have been doing this from generation to generation.

She says they brought in select silver foxes from all over what was the Soviet Union, then they bred the calmest pups.

When she started in 1958, Trut could have been jailed for doing that kind of genetic experimentation.

TRUT: [Speaking Russian] there have been 60 generations of them. Well, the selection turned what were once aggressive and sneaky foxes into animals as friendly as a dog.

She says after just a few generations they turned what were once aggressive, sneaky foxes into animals as friendly as a dog.

And they started to look and act a lot like dogs, too. Over the course of more than 60 generations, Trut and her team documented physical changes as each generation grew tamer. They had fewer stress hormones, floppy ears, and they started wagging their tails—among other things.

Trut died in October at 91 years old—after more than 60 years of living with her foxes.

Next, another, more infamous, scientist: Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

ZIMBARDO: We wanted to ask the question: what happens if you take people—all of whom are good, normal, healthy college students, intelligent—and we put them in a bad place.

So, Zimbardo simulated a prison in the basement of Stanford University. He paid college boys to be prison guards and prisoners for two weeks. He told the Skavlan TV Show about the results.

ZIMBARDO: On the first day, nothing happened.

The prison guards felt awkward in their uniforms.

ZIMBARDO: But then, the next morning, the prisoners rebelled.

Suddenly, the students in the prison uniforms weren’t classmates, they were “dangerous prisoners.” And the guards started psychologically demeaning them.

Halfway through the experiment, Zimbardo invited colleagues to interview the subjects. The first one who came was a woman he was dating.

ZIMBARDO: She starts crying. I said, ‘what’s the matter with you?’ She said ‘it’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys. They’re not prisoners, they’re not guards, they’re boys. And you’re responsible,’ and she runs out.

He stopped the experiment shortly after that, about a week early.

Other scientists have questioned the ethics of the study, and its implications are still being studied.

Zimbardo died on October 14 at age 91.

Finally, a man who built a business to help other people build their homes.

COMMERCIAL: [(Music) Home Depot, Home Depot]

Bernie Marcus told Job Creators Network that he grew up in a fourth-floor tenement in New Jersey.

BERNIE MARCUS: We were poor. We had nothing. We had nothing.

On a walk around a different neighborhood, he decided that when he grew up he wanted to live in a house with a porch.

MARCUS: And I wasn’t envious. I just said ‘How’d they do it?’

So he went to school and worked various jobs until he was eventually put in charge of a home improvement chain where he met his future business partner. The two were fired from the chain at the same time in 1978 and started planning. A year later, they opened the doors of a rival.

AUDIO: [Home Depot commercial]

The company is now one of the world’s largest home improvement retailers—doing business in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Marcus died on November 4. He was 95 years old.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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