The greatest Czech citizen is a man
who doesn't exist. Jára Cimrman was dreamed up as a modest
caricature of the Czech people for a 1966 radio program, but
he's been adopted as a sort of fictive national hero. By
general agreement he's an accomplished author, detective,
poet, inventor, mathematician, playwright, sportsman,
philosopher, traveler, teacher, and composer; in a 2005
television competition he would have been voted "The Greatest
Czech" but was disqualified for not existing. No one quite
knows what he looks like, but his accomplishments are listed
on an immortal Wikipedia
page:
He proposed the Panama Canal to
the U.S. government while composing a libretto for an opera
about it.
Fleeing arctic cannibals, he came
within 7 meters of reaching the North Pole.
He invented yogurt.
He created the first puppet show
in Paraguay.
He corresponded with George
Bernard Shaw for many years, without receiving a
response.
He constructed the first rigid
airship using Swedish steel and Czech wicker.
He reworked the electrical
contact on Edison's first light bulb and found a sublet for
Gustave Eiffel.
He suggested that Mendeleev
rotate his first draft of the Periodic Table.
He devised the philosophy of
externism, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, the
observer exists and the outside world does not. In
externism, the outside word exists but the philosopher does
not.
When Alexander Graham Bell invented
the telephone, he found three missed calls from
Cimrman.
