Fame is a Fickle Thing

A friend posted a blog link on Facebook yesterday that precipitated an amusing conversation between me and an architect I know (for the uninitiated I'm an electrical engineer).  I was reading the blog this morning while I was waiting with the architect for the building owner to deign to show up at a design meeting.  As the architect was flitting in and out of the meeting room to get coffee I read An Unexpected Ass Kicking.  The blog details the encounter of the blogger with Russell Kirsch.

I happened to laugh out loud and the architect asked me what was so funny.

So I told him about the article and that it was about an encounter with Russell Kirsch.

"Who's Russell Kirsch?" he asked.

"He's a fellow who's had more of a profound effect on society than that architect that designed Falling Water," I replied.

"You mean Frank Lloyd Wright!I can't believe you don't know his name..." the architect declaimed somewhat stridently and then went off on he influential he was.

The First Digital Image.

"Kirsch led a team to design the first internally programmable computer, made the first scanner, the first digital photograph.  Like dropping a pebble into a pond the processes he pioneered led to CAT scans, satellite photography and arguably Man walking on the Moon.  And you've never heard of him until today"

Can someone explain to me why a philandering architect is more famous than the fellow married to his wife for at least 50 years?  We've been building buildings for thousands of years and while Wright's buildings were innovative they were still just a refinement of something we've been doing for thousands of years.  Kirsch's accomplishments were at the bleeding edge of technology of the time.  Kirsch and his team literally came up with something that had never been done before.  I'm not disparaging Wright's accomplishments I just feel that Kirsch and his team have had a greater effect on the world. 

Fame is a fickle thing.