I recently listened to Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. It is one of those books that has acquired a reputation few people seem interested in challenging. Mention Carlyle today, particularly in academic circles, and before long someone will invoke the “Great Man Theory” as though the matter has been settled.
Perhaps it has. History is far too complex to be explained by extraordinary individuals alone. Institutions matter. Culture matters. Economics matters. Chance matters. But I wonder if we have dismissed Carlyle’s larger question too quickly.
Who are our heroes? Not our celebrities. Not the people who dominate headlines for a week before disappearing into the next news cycle. Heroes. The men and women whose work quietly changed the course of civilization.
If I were to write On Heroes and Hero-Worship for the Information Age, my volume would begin differently than Carlyle’s. In fact, it would begin with a woman. That may seem an amusing response to the “Great Man Theory,” but there is a more practical reason.
The Teacher: Grace Hopper
Every generation celebrates the person who plants the flag. Far fewer remember the people who built the ladder.
Grace Hopper never walked on the Moon. She never founded a technology company. She never wrote the operating system that powers much of the Internet. Yet each of those accomplishments depended upon a world transformed by computing, and Hopper helped make computing practical.
When electronic computers first appeared, programming them was an exercise in speaking the machine’s language. Hopper believed that relationship was backward. Computers existed to serve people, so they ought to become fluent in ours. Her pioneering work on compilers and her advocacy for machine-independent programming helped transform software from a specialized craft into an engineering discipline. The development of COBOL demonstrated that programs could be written in something approaching plain English, making computing accessible to businesses, governments, and institutions that had neither the time nor the desire to think in binary or assembly language.
Like many pioneers, Hopper accumulated stories that grew into legend. One of the most enduring tells of a moth discovered in the Harvard Mark II computer, taped into the engineering logbook with the notation, “First actual case of bug being found.” Engineers had used the term bug for decades to describe mechanical defects, but Hopper’s association with that famous incident ensured the story became part of computing folklore. Whether teaching naval officers or young programmers, she understood that memorable stories often teach better than dry manuals.
Perhaps Hopper’s greatest achievement was not a particular language or compiler but proving that software could outlive the hardware on which it was written. The longevity of COBOL is almost unbelievable. Decades after its introduction, governments, banks, insurance companies, and large corporations still depended upon software written in the language. By the late 1990s, programmers found themselves racing to correct programs that stored years with only two digits, contributing to what became known as the Y2K problem. The irony was remarkable. Code written to solve the problems of one generation had endured long enough to create challenges for the next. That is not a failure of engineering. It is a testament to it.
We often judge technology by how quickly it is replaced. Hopper’s work reminds us that the greatest innovations become so dependable that we forget they are still there. Long after the computers she programmed had been retired to museums, the ideas she championed continued to process payrolls, manage inventories, guide governments, and support the digital economy.
The heroes who follow all inherited a world she helped create.
The Engineer: Wernher von Braun
History rarely grants us uncomplicated heroes.
Wernher von Braun’s life reminds us that extraordinary technical achievement does not erase moral ambiguity. His work began in one of history’s darkest chapters and continued into one of humanity’s brightest. The same mind that helped develop the V-2 rocket would later help place Americans on the Moon. That tension cannot be ignored, nor should it be.
After the Second World War, the United States faced a difficult decision. Through Operation Paperclip, hundreds of German scientists and engineers were brought to America rather than left to Soviet recruitment or postwar obscurity. It was not an endorsement of their pasts. It was an acknowledgment that history rarely presents nations with morally pristine choices. The Cold War was fought not only with armies and diplomacy, but with knowledge, and knowledge has a way of surviving the governments that first employed it.
Von Braun’s story reminds us that history is seldom as tidy as we wish. We often prefer our heroes and villains neatly separated, but reality rarely cooperates. Great achievements can emerge from deeply flawed people, just as noble intentions can produce disappointing results. Maturity requires holding both truths at once. Neither condemnation nor celebration alone is sufficient.
Yet neither can we ignore the scale of von Braun’s contribution. He expanded humanity’s horizon. For thousands of years, the heavens belonged to poets, philosophers, and theologians. Within a generation, they became destinations. The engineer’s task is not merely to solve problems. It is to make yesterday’s impossibilities tomorrow’s routine.
Working in Huntsville has made that lesson impossible for me to ignore.
Before the space program, Redstone Arsenal was simply another military installation, known primarily for storing and developing ordnance. Today it is difficult to imagine Huntsville without the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA, or the aerospace industry that surrounds them. One man’s vision did not create Rocket City by itself, but neither can the city’s story be told without him and the remarkable team of German engineers who followed him to Alabama.
Years ago, while supporting the Missile Defense Agency, I worked in the Von Braun Complex on Redstone Arsenal. Nearly every day I walked past a small exhibit dedicated to him on my way to lunch. His desk sat quietly alongside photographs, documents, and artifacts from a career that helped define an era. There was nothing grand about the display. It was almost understated. Yet every time I passed it, I was reminded that history often feels very different when it becomes local. The names in books become places where you work. The people become part of the landscape.
That legacy still lingers across Huntsville. Every autumn, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center hosts a Biergarten beneath the enormous Saturn V suspended inside the Davidson Center. Families gather to celebrate food, music, and German heritage while standing beneath one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements. It is an oddly fitting scene. The rocket overhead represents American triumph, yet its story cannot be told without acknowledging the complicated origins of the people who helped build it.
Perhaps that is the real lesson of Wernher von Braun. Heroes need not be flawless to be historically significant. Their lives may challenge us as much as they inspire us. If we refuse to examine people whose stories are morally complex, we risk exchanging history for mythology. Civilization is not built by saints alone. More often, it is built by imperfect people whose achievements and failures become inseparable from the age in which they lived.
The Visionary: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is often remembered as the face of Apple, but that tells only part of the story.
After being dismissed from the very company he co-founded, Jobs did what many remarkable people do when confronted with failure. He built something new. NeXT was never a commercial success in the traditional sense, yet its operating system and development environment proved so advanced that Apple eventually acquired the company to bring Jobs back. The technology developed at NeXT became the foundation for the operating systems that continue to power Apple’s computers, phones, and tablets today.
At nearly the same time, Jobs recognized the potential of a small computer graphics division that would become Pixar. Under his leadership, Pixar transformed animation from a technological curiosity into an art form that reshaped modern filmmaking.
Jobs’ gift was never simply inventing products. It was seeing possibilities that others overlooked. He understood that engineering alone does not change civilization. Technology changes civilization only when it becomes useful, beautiful, and accessible enough for ordinary people to embrace it. Visionaries do not merely imagine the future. They persuade the rest of us to live in it.
The Builder: Linus Torvalds
If there is a distinctly Information Age hero, it is Linus Torvalds. Previous generations celebrated the builder who erected monuments. Torvalds built a foundation.
In 1991, what began as a personal operating system project soon became something far greater. Linux quietly powers much of the modern world. It runs the servers behind the Internet, dominates cloud computing, drives the world’s fastest supercomputers, powers Android smartphones, and operates countless embedded systems that most people never realize contain a computer at all.
In 1991, what began as a personal operating system project soon became something far greater. Linux quietly powers much of the modern world. It runs the servers behind the Internet, dominates cloud computing, drives the world’s fastest supercomputers, powers Android smartphones, and operates countless embedded systems that most people never realize contain a computer at all.
Its greatest success is also its greatest invisibility. Most people will never knowingly use Linux. Nearly everyone depends upon it. That achievement was not simply the result of writing remarkable software. It was the result of creating something others wanted to build with. Torvalds did not merely write an operating system. He cultivated a community. Thousands of developers, representing countless nations, companies, universities, and volunteers, have spent decades improving a foundation that belongs to no single corporation and yet benefits nearly everyone.
Civilization advances when people leave foundations stronger than they found them.
Torvalds also reminds us that conviction is not always polite. Early in Linux’s development, he engaged in a now-famous public debate with computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum over the future of operating system design. Tanenbaum argued that Linux’s monolithic kernel represented yesterday’s thinking and that microkernels were the inevitable future. Torvalds disagreed, sometimes bluntly, defending practical engineering over theoretical elegance.
The exchange has become legendary, not because either man resorted to personal attacks, but because both cared deeply enough about the subject to argue their ideas in public. History has a way of rewarding those willing to test their convictions rather than merely preserve harmony.
There is a temptation in every generation to believe that agreement is the highest virtue. It is not.
Progress often emerges from respectful disagreement, rigorous criticism, and the willingness to say, “I think you’re wrong, and here’s why.” Torvalds has never been known for diplomatic language. His emails can be sharp, impatient, and occasionally unforgettable. Yet beneath the rough edges lies an unwavering commitment to technical excellence. He has repeatedly argued that software should be judged by whether it works, not by whether its author wins popularity contests.
There is a lesson in that. Courtesy is a virtue. Compromise is sometimes a virtue. Neither should come at the expense of truth.
The Information Age was not built by people who simply went along to get along. It was built by people willing to challenge assumptions, defend good ideas, discard bad ones, and submit their work to the relentless scrutiny of their peers. Linux remains one of the clearest examples of what can happen when conviction is matched with openness and the confidence to let the best ideas prevail.
The Legend: Chuck Norris
My final hero may seem like an odd choice. He did not transform computing. He did not build rockets. He did not change software engineering. He became something just as interesting. A legend.
Every civilization creates myths. Long before Hollywood, there were Hercules, King Arthur, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry. Their stories grew larger than life because they represented qualities people admired: strength, courage, perseverance, and honor. The details mattered less than what the stories taught.
The Information Age produced its own folk hero. Chuck Norris first entered popular culture as a martial artist and actor. His fight with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon remains one of cinema’s most memorable martial arts sequences, introducing millions to his athleticism and screen presence. During the 1980s he became a familiar face in advertisements, fitness equipment commercials, and action films. Later, an entire generation came to know him as Cordell Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger, where justice was delivered with equal measures of integrity and a well-timed roundhouse kick.
By any reasonable measure, that would have been enough to secure a respectable place in popular culture. The Internet had other plans.
Somewhere in the early years of online forums and email chains, Chuck Norris stopped being merely an actor. He became folklore. “Chuck Norris Facts” spread across the Internet like digital campfire stories. Each one attempted to outdo the last with increasingly impossible feats. Gravity yielded. Physics negotiated. Fear took the day off.
The remarkable thing was not that people believed the jokes. It was that everyone understood the joke. The man had become an archetype.
Unlike the legendary heroes of old, Norris witnessed his own transformation into folklore. He embraced it with good humor, proving that sometimes the wisest response to becoming a myth is simply to smile and let people enjoy the story.
The Internet eventually gave us image macros, AI-generated videos, and endless variations on the same theme. Somehow Chuck Norris continued to survive every new technological era, roundhouse kicking his way through each generation of digital culture. Most memes fade within weeks. This one has endured for decades.
Perhaps that is because the joke was never really about Chuck Norris. It was about our enduring need for heroes who appear larger than life.
There is one memory, however, that reminds me there is a real man behind the legend. When my son earned the rank of Eagle Scout, he received a personally signed letter of congratulations from Chuck Norris. It hangs among the keepsakes of that achievement, a quiet reminder that the man behind the myth took the time to encourage a young Scout he would never meet. That gesture says more to me about his character than a thousand Internet jokes ever could.
Technology has changed. Human nature has not. We still tell stories about heroes. Sometimes those stories inspire us. Sometimes they make us laugh. Every now and then, they accomplish both.
Whom Do We Choose to Admire?
These five names will probably never appear together on anyone’s list of popular heroes. That is perfectly fine. Popularity has never been a reliable measure of significance.
Grace Hopper taught computers to speak a language people could understand.
Wernher von Braun reminded us that engineering can carry humanity beyond horizons once reserved for dreamers, even as his own life reminds us that history is rarely morally uncomplicated.
Steve Jobs taught us that technology succeeds only when it serves ordinary people.
Linus Torvalds demonstrated that the strongest foundations are often the ones others are invited to build upon.
Chuck Norris reminds us that even an age defined by silicon, software, and artificial intelligence still tells stories around the digital campfire.
Together, they reveal something Carlyle understood remarkably well. Every civilization chooses its heroes. Not formally. Not by election or decree. We choose them through our admiration. We tell their stories. We preserve their work. We imitate their virtues, and sometimes their flaws.
That is why hero worship deserves more thought than we usually give it. If we admire only wealth, we become a civilization that measures success in dollars. If we admire only fame, we become a civilization that mistakes visibility for significance. But if we admire teachers, engineers, visionaries, builders, and people whose lives become worthy of legend, we encourage those same virtues in the generations that follow.
Perhaps that is the lesson Carlyle still has to teach us. The question is not whether great individuals alone make history. History is obviously more complicated than that. The better question is whether the people we choose to admire reveal the kind of civilization we hope to become. If that is hero worship, perhaps it is worth practicing with greater care.
Written in conversation with
This essay was shaped by ideas encountered in the following works:
- Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)
- Grace Murray Hopper’s lectures and interviews on computing, programming languages, and innovation
- Central Intelligence Agency, Review of Operation Paperclip
- Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
- Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution
- The enduring folklore of Chuck Norris, from Enter the Dragon to the Internet’s “Chuck Norris Facts”
