- Harry Lime, The Third Man
The Battle of Solferino (part of the Second War of Italian Independence, in which an alliance of France and Sardinia defeated Austria) took place 12 years after the Sonderbund War, in 1859. As far as I know Dunant had taken no part in the Sonderbund War- he was a student in Geneva at the time- and neither had anyone else on the committee apart from Dufour. In fact, two of them had been outside Switzerland at the time.
The Swiss discovered graph theory, the Ice Age, the Law of Large Numbers and actually most of pre-Laplacian probability theory, cavitation, DNA, topology, ozone, the modern mathematical concept of "function", metal ion complexation by ligands, the endothelium, e, stevia and several thousand other plant and arthropod species, arguably logarithms, the molecular structure of cocaine, the nuclei of comets, classical beam theory and in particular the critical load of buckling beams, nitrocellulose (aka smokeless powder and celluloid), the laws of hydrodynamics, the origin of beeswax, convergent evolution (de Candolle), the composition of alcohol, the hyperbolic functions, dolomite, the Balmer formula for the spectrum of hydrogen, the atmospheric origin of plant carbon content, light-entrained circadian rhythms, the irrationality of π, the Lambert law for diffuse illumination, and the contagious nature of syphilis.
They also did an enormous amount of careful work in the 17th through 19th centuries on cataloging and systematizing fossils, stratigraphy, geography, plant taxonomy, fossil animal taxonomy, etc., that underpins our modern understanding of the history of Earth and life. That work isn't so easily summarized in a list of discoveries, because it wasn't the discovery of one single species or mineral that led to the insights, but the accumulated weight of many thousands.
They also invented Calvinism (to which Congregationalism, Puritanism, and Presbyterianism belong), invar, the Argand lamp (the main light source other than the fireplace in most European and American homes during the 19th century), Saussurian semiotics, most of current mathematical notation, jewel bearings, arguably Wagner's Ring cycle of operas, the transverse Mercator projection and actually most modern map projections, caissons, the cross-beat escapement, absinthe, solar ovens (Horace de Saussure), passivation of iron by pickling, the remontoire, the fuel cell, the rack-and-pinion railway, the internal-combustion-powered automobile (the de Rivaz engine, running on hydrogen, in 01808), the full metal jacket bullet, the first practical hygrometer, Rousseau's political philosophy, forensic facial reconstruction, the high-explosive artillery shell, the roller chain, malleable cast iron [edit: maybe not], the microtome, the tourbillon escapement, milk chocolate, and scientific medicine (post-Galenic, cleaning wounds and using drugs with knowledge of their lethal doses).
And Jaquet-Droz's automaton called The Writer is perhaps the most astounding Swiss invention of all: an android containing a programmable pen plotter using a vector font, completed by 01774, 248 years ago.
Maybe we should give them some credit for inventing modern democracy, too.
Suck it, Leonardo.
Less well known is that he was also the first to synthesize psilocybin.
I guess it's because dates aren't numbers any more, but names. It would be like adding an "O" in front of every name, like "Ojohn", "Omary".
The powerful effect of such small things can be very thought-provoking.
Interestingly, it's true for me too, even though I've been trying this Long Now date format experiment for a year or so now. I just had to stop myself from writing the Intel 8080 as "08080", suggesting that I'm mentally parsing these dates as "0 1774" and the like.
> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates to guard against the deca-millennium bug (the “Y10K” problem) which will come into effect in about 8,000 years. As you may have noticed any reference we make to a year begins with a zero: 01977, 03012, 02000, 00521, 01215, etc.
— https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...
Switzerland really only emerged in the mid to late 19th century. However the intellectual and scientific output since then on a per population bases can match the Italy.
as if production is the coveted metric