Polish heroes
I once had a Polish friend who insisted on staying in his cinema seat to the very end of the credits so he could scan them for Polish names. Ten minutes after everyone else had gone home he’d still be there studying the endless lists of assistant key-grips and occasionally shouting triumphantly: “Aha, a Wozniak! You see, we Poles are everywhere!” My response was to shout “Aha, a Brit!” every time I saw Denzil Washington, but I don't think he got it. Neil Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, Abraham Lincoln and James T. Kirk are, of course, also Brits.
A similar thing happens every year when the Nobel Prize winners are announced. There’s always an obscure American biophysicist or mathematician somewhere on the list who had a Polish grandparent and Poland’s media makes sure everyone knows about it. For some reason Monica Lewinsky was not taken to the nation’s heart in quite the same way. It’s an irritating but understandable national trait. There's no doubt that Poles are remarkable inventive and creative people but, until very recently, if a Pole wanted to be inventive or creative the safest place to do it was somewhere other than Poland.
We all know about Copernicus and Currie and the other famous ones, but there is a long list of inventive Poles that nobody ever talks about. Why had I never heard about Kazimierz Żegleń for example? Żegleń was a Polish priest who invented the bullet proof vest. This story should be made into a Russell Crowe blockbuster called “Vest of God” immediately.
Like most inventive Poles Father Żegleń had to leave Poland before his big idea had a chance, in Żegleń's case it was for Chicago. Most people don’t associate priests with bullet-resistant clothing, but then most people haven’t attended mass in Chicago. Apart from providing a cheap plot device for every Hollywood cop movie since 1974, Żegleń's bullet proof vest had a major impact on world history. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was wearing a Żegleń vest when he was shot by an assassin in Sarajevo in 1914. If he’d been killed, it could have led to a catastrophic global conflict of some kind.
Jan Józef Ignacy Łukasiewicz is another of my favourite Polish unknowns. The man invented the oil industry. I don't mean some clever and vital piece of equipment used in the oil industry, I mean the actual industry itself. In Łukasiewicz’s time most domestic lighting was provided by burning whale oil, which worked fine but meant you had to go out and find a whale every time you wanted to stay up late playing Halo 3. This was highly inconvenient for the whales and required a lot of tedious sailing around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Łukasiewicz’s idea was to take that annoying black stuff that seeps out of the ground all over southwest Poland and turn it into a multi-billion dollar global industry.
If bullet proof vests and the oil industry aren’t impressive enough, how about movies with sound? Polish engineer Josef Tykociński-Tykociner was the first person to record sound directly onto film along with images. He gave a demonstration of his process in 1922 with a short film of his wife saying: “I will ring,” and then ringing a bell. This may not have been the most exciting movie in history, but it was undeniably honest. Clearly this needs to be remade for 21st-century audiences, possibly with Jodie Foster in the starring role and a thermonuclear device instead of a bell.
Jamie Stokes