Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen
Hello everyone.
For several years now I've been collecting stories about Nobodies
with extraordinary destiny,
men and women we were not told about at school,
but whose stories collided with history.
In doing this research, I discovered stories of extraordinary lives
like, for example, the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
He is a Japanese businessman
who happened to be in Hiroshima in 1945; August 6, 1945 more exactly,
which was not the best day to be in Hiroshima,
since it was on that day that an atomic bomb fell on the city,
inadvertently killing 140,000 victims.
70% of the buildings were destroyed.
But Tsutomu managed to take shelter, and he survived.
He suffered extensive burns, but he was still fit enough
to go back home three days later, and then go back to work.
And to him, home was in Nagasaki.
(Laughs)
So he goes back to the office,
and there, his colleagues badger him with questions
on what he saw, since it was the first time
any atomic bomb had fallen on civilians.
He explains what happened, the lighting flash,
the buildings evaporating in front of his eyes ...
Incidentally his boss is quite dubious,
because it's quite a far-fetched excuse for not going to work,
and at that precise moment,
a second atomic bomb falls on Nagasaki,
and this time, it kills 70,000 people.
But Tsutomu survives it, and dies 65 years later,
in 2010, at the age of 93.
He is the only person acknowledged by the Japanese government
as having survived two atomic bombs.
That's exactly the kind of story I like to discover and share with people.
When I was transcribing these stories,
I realized that there was some common thread,
of people, for example, who changed the world
just because they dared to act or to think differently.
One of my favorite examples is Jadav Payeng.
He was a 16-year-old boy in 1979,
he lived near the Brahmaputra River in India.
One day, he was shocked by a terrible scene:
he sees hundreds of dead reptiles on a sandbank on the river.
He decides to do something about it because this vision moves him deeply.
He contacts the forest authorities
but they explain to him that there is nothing much to do
because the sandbank is too dry, too sterile,
and no tree can grow there.
So he says he's still going to try.
So he begins to plant bamboos on this sandbank.
After a few years of hard work,
where there was nothing at all, he managed to grow a bamboo plantation.
And since it works pretty well, he decides to plant real trees.
And ten years later, he created a forest
where there was nothing at all a few years before,
where animals will come to find shelter,
even some endangered species; rhinos, tigers.
Today, more than 30 years after he started his work,
Jadav has managed to create a 500-hectare jungle,
bigger than Central Park.
Today, this jungle accommodates 100 elephants every year
and it was by tracking them that the Ministry of Forests
discovered Jadav's work.
They eventually started to help him in 2008.
Jadav's idea was crazy but it was a good one.
And it ended up being supported.
Sometimes it takes time.
Jadav had a huge impact on the environment.
Among these forgotten heroes of history,
some have sometimes saved thousands of people.
This is particularly the case with Ignace Semmelweis.
He was a Hungarian doctor
who lived in the 19th century, and you should know that back then,
women might prefer to give birth in the street rather than in the hospital
because their mortality rate was around 20% in hospitals.
The culprit was an infectious disease, puerperal fever,
and it was thought at the time that it was incurable.
It was taken for granted that one in five women died in childbirth.
That's quite a quota!
And that's where Ignace Semmelweis comes in:
in 1846, he is appointed head of a large Austrian clinic
and he is determined to eradicate this plague.
He starts to correlate elements
and realizes that the mortality rate in his department is directly related
to the fact that doctors caring for pregnant women also perform autopsies.
They fiddle with the corpses before tending to delivering women.
You should know that at the time, the concept of microbes does not exist,
so the link is not easy to make.
But Ignace has an intuition:
he thinks that there must be
a kind of cadaverous substance that emanates from the body
and that doctors pass it on to laboring women.
He has this revolutionary and crazy idea:
he will ask the doctors to wash their hands
before examining the patients.
The mortality rate will drop drown from 18 to 1.3%.
It's a huge success, but against all odds,
he is putting the scientific community against him for two reasons:
the first reason is that doctors consider that his method is not scientific
but rather superstitious,
since he does not know exactly why washing hands avoids the disease;
and the second reason is by accepting this method,
doctors recognize somehow
that they have helped killing thousands of patients.
So Ignace is supported by the government,
but he is still despised by his colleagues and suffers a lot from this situation.
He will have a nervous breakdown,
and he will end his days in a psychiatric hospital.
The case is so unfair
that he gave his name to a psychological effect,
the Semmelweiss effect, designating the tendency to reject any new idea
if it upsets our habits, even if it is supported by facts.
And ironically, a few years later,
Ignace Semmelweiss will be avenged by science
with the discovery of the existence of microbes.
But Ignace's idea was weird at the time.
Nevertheless, it was a good idea, and it ended up being accepted.
Sometimes it takes time.
The man I'm going to talk about now
played an even bigger role as he saved the world.
Stanislav Petrov is a Russian officer you have probably never heard about,
but who probably saved your lives.
In 1983, he was assigned to a very important task:
he was in charge of the surveillance of Russian airspace
so he was responsible for detecting possible US missile attacks.
One day, he watches his screen,
and he sees five missiles coming towards Russia.
He just has to press a big red button to alert his hierarchy
who will send an immediate counterattack and start a world nuclear war.
But he knows that humanity's future depends on his move.
And this makes him hesitate; there is something wrong.
There are too few missiles coming up compared to the huge US military arsenal
and on top of that, there is a ground radar
that does not confirm the observations of the satellite.
So Stanislav decides to tell his superiors that it is a false alarm,
or a bluff, as far as he knows, he couldn't say which.
This is one of the biggest bluffs in history.
History proved him right since it was a bug in the system.
It was a real close call for the end of the world
thanks to the small hesitation of a Russian officer.
(Laughter)
You might think he was hailed as a hero, but it was not quite the case:
he was suspected of treachery and pushed out of the army.
15 years passed
before one of his colleagues wrote down what he had witnessed that day
and before the story of Stanislas was unveiled to the citizens.
For that, he was bestowed a decoration, and honored by the United Nations.
If you ask him whether he considers himself a hero,
he answers that he just did his job.
The quintessence of any hero statement.
(Laughter)
Stanislav's idea was risky but it was a good idea
that ended up being acknowledged.
Sometimes it takes time.
Like in comics, with Stanislav comes a negative hero,
a man who almost destroyed the world all by himself:
Thomas Midgley.
He looks pretty cool on this picture.
Thomas Midgley is an American chemist
working in 1911 for General Motors.
He was working on noisy combustion engines.
While working on this problem,
Midgley discovers that by putting lead in gasoline,
engines run much more smoothly and quietly.
It's an international success,
General Motors will sell gallons of leaded gasoline.
But there's just one small problem, that is lead is a violent poison.
So it gets massively spread into the atmosphere.
It is not until the early 2000s
that leaded petrol was withdrawn from the market.
Its dangerousness was already known at the time.
Public health is starting to suffer,
and even Thomas Migley suffers from side effects.
But he washed his hands with his gasoline in front of the journalists
to show that it is harmless - he had the sense of marketing.
(Laughter)
To make up for that,
he decides to dive into another problem: leaking fridges.
At the time, when a fridge was leaking, people would die
because there was toxic gas inside the fridge.
So Migley tries to come up with an alternative.
He will create freon, the first CFC, chlorofluorocarbons.
Everything works perfectly well.
He inhales freon in front of the press
since he is consistent with himself, to show that it's harmless.
It was not until the 70s, 30 years after Migley's death,
that the real effects of CFCs were known.
A big hole in the ozone layer was found.
Thank you very much, Thomas Migley!
He kind of caused the hole in the ozone layer all by himself.
Migley's ideas seemed good, but they had catastrophic consequences.
And that too, to know it, it sometimes takes time.
We could draw lots of lessons from these stories:
the first, if you can unleash a nuclear war,
it is better to think first, if you can.
But beyond that, there is the idea that a single person
can have a huge impact on the rest of the world
without being rich, famous or powerful at first.
It is sometimes enough to dare to think differently.
All these ideas that you prefer to put aside
because they are too crazy, too risky or too weird,
please give them a chance.
If they are good, time will do them justice.
Thank you.
(Applause)