In this special issue, the first of five in which we'll pick and profile the 100 most influential players of this century, we start with the category of leaders, politicians and revolutionaries. Future issues will look at artists and entertainers, business titans, scientists and thinkers, then heroes and inspirations. By the end of 1999 we plan to sum it all up with, among other things, a choice of the Person of the Century. It's not a simple task, but it helps to start by looking at what the great themes of this century have been.

Rarely does a century dawn so clearly and cleanly. In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, ending the Victorian era. Her Majesty, as if on cue, died the following January, after a 63-year reign. Her empire included one-quarter of the earth's population, but the Boer War in South Africa was signaling the end of the colonial era. In China, the Boxer Rebellion heralded the awakening of a new giant. In America, cars were replacing horses, 42% of workers were in farming (today it's 2%), and the average life-span was about 50 (today it's around 75).

The tape recorder was unveiled in 1900 at the Paris Exposition, to which visitors flocked to be scandalized by Rodin's non-Victorian statues, and Kodak introduced the Brownie camera, an apt symbol of a century in which technology would at first seem magical, then become simple, cheap and personal. The Scholastic Aptitude Test was born that year, permitting a power shift from an aristocracy to a meritocracy. The Wright brothers went to Kitty Hawk to try out their gliders. Lenin, 30, published his first newspaper calling for revolution in Russia. Churchill, 25, was elected to the House of Commons. J.P. Morgan began working with a young executive named Charles Schwab to buy out Andrew Carnegie and conglomerate U.S. Steel, by far the biggest business in the world. And the German physicist Max Planck made one of the discoveries that would shape the century: that atoms emit radiations of energy in bursts he called quanta.

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