Heroes of Progress, Pt. 50: Bill Gates

Introducing the American software developer, businessman and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft, Bill Gates.

Alexander C. R. Hammond — Aug 5, 2020

Today marks the 50th, and final, installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. Over the last two years, this bi-weekly column has provided a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. You can find the 49th part of this series here.

This week, our hero is Bill Gates – an American software developer, businessman, and philanthropist. Thanks to Microsoft, the company that Gates co-founded, personal computers went from being used almost exclusively by computer hobbyists, to being a staple in millions of homes and offices around the world. By helping to make computers available to the masses, Gates’ work dramatically changed the world we live in and made many once-complicated tasks much simpler. Moreover, global productivity increases enabled by his computers have likely added trillions to the world’s economy.

Gates has also created several charitable organizations, and alongside his wife, he created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the world’s largest philanthropic organization. Through providing education, vaccinations, investment in infrastructure, combatting diseases, and building improved sanitation facilities, Gates’ philanthropic endeavors have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people and helped to save tens of millions of lives.

William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a well-known lawyer, and his mother served on the board of serval large companies. Gates grew up in a household he’d later describe as “well-off” and his two sisters have described him as a happy child. At a young age, Gates showed signs of competitiveness and intelligence. He excelled at playing the board games Risk and Monopoly, and he would often spend hours a day reading.

At 13 years old, Gates began studying at Lakeside School, an exclusive private school in Seattle. Gates performed exceptionally in nearly all his subjects but had a unique aptitude in math and science. He later noted that through the 8th grade, he enjoyed the fact he was able to do reasonably well in school without any effort.

Soon after Gates arrived at Lakeside, the school obtained a teletype terminal (an electromechanical teleprinter), and a local computer company offered Lakeside students some time on their computers. Gates quickly became fascinated with computer software. He spent much of his free time working at the teletype terminal and was even excused from other lessons to pursue this interest. During this time, Gates wrote his first-ever computer program – a game of tic-tac-toe.

Gates forged several friendships in the school’s computer room, notably with Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other co-founder, Ric Weiland, Microsoft’s first employee, and Kent Evans, Gates’ best friend and first business partner. One summer, Gates and his friends were banned from the local computer shop after they were caught exploiting bugs in the system to gain free computer time. After the ban, the four students formed the “Lakeside Programmers Club” to make money. The club volunteered to help the computer store fix the bugs in their software.

In 1971, Gates and Evans began to automate Lakeside’s class-scheduling system to make timetables for the students. Unfortunately, at the end of the school year, Evans died in a mountain climbing accident. Gates was deeply saddened by Evans’ passing and turned to Allen to help finish the project.

Although Allen was two years older than Gates, and despite the pair not always seeing eye-to-eye, the two teenagers quickly became friends and bonded over their passion for software. When Gates was 17, he and Allen formed their first business venture called “Traf-o-Data” – a computer program that helped monitor traffic patterns in Seattle. The pair made $20,000 for their work.

In 1973, Gates graduated from Lakeside with an extraordinarily high SAT score of 1590 out of 1600. In the Fall, he enrolled at Harvard University. Although Gates’ major was in pre-law, he spent most of his time at Harvard studying mathematics and graduate-level computer science.

In 1975, Gates read about the new Altair 8800 microcomputer kit in the magazine Popular Electronics. Gates and Allen decided to write to the company that created the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), to gauge their interest in having someone build a software program that could run on the computer. To do that, Gates decided to call the President of MITS from his dorm phone.

Gates told the President that he had already created the software and attempted to sell MITS the program. In reality, neither Gates nor Allen had an Altair machine, and the pair hadn’t written a single line of code for the computer. The President at MITS asked for a demonstration, and Gates and Allen spent the next month working relentlessly in Harvard’s computer lab writing the code. “From that moment,” Gates later remembered, “I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.”

In spring 1975, Allen and Gates traveled to MITS’ offices in New Mexico to test run the code. Despite never having tested the code before, the demonstration was a success, and both Allen and Gates were hired by MITS. Gates never returned to study at Harvard.

While working at MITS, Gates and Allen also formed their own partnership, which they named “Micro-Soft” – a combination of the words “microcomputer” and “software.” The company focused on developing programming language software for a variety of different systems. By 1976, Gates and Allen left MITS, dropped the hyphen in their company’s name, registered the name “Microsoft,” and opened their first office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the same year, Gates and Allen also hired their old high school friend Ric Weiland as Microsoft’s first employee.

By 1979, Microsoft was grossing approximately $2.5 million a year. In 1980, Microsoft struck a deal with IBM to provide the basic operating system that would run on IBM’s new computers. Although the contract with IBM only earned Microsoft a small fee, the prestige of doing business with one of the world’s largest corporations helped transform Microsoft into one of the world’s leading software companies.

In 1981, Microsoft, formerly a partnership between Allen and Gates, was reorganized as a privately held corporation. Aged 23, Gates was made CEO and chairman of the board, and the offices moved to Bellevue, Washington. For the first five years of Microsoft’s existence, Gates personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code the company created. By 1983, about 30 percent of the world’s computers ran on Microsoft software, and the company established subsidiaries in England, Japan, and France. In the same year, Allen left Microsoft.

In November 1985, Microsoft released the first retail version of Microsoft Windows. The program sold well, and in 1986, when Microsoft went public, Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire. Since then, Gates has continually been one of the world’s richest people.

In 1989, Gates released Microsoft Office, which included the early versions of applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel. In 1995, Microsoft released the operating system Windows 95. The software marked an enormous leap forward in terms of both graphics and, most importantly, the design of operating systems, and sold rapidly.

Thanks to the Windows operating system, computers were no longer too complicated for the everyday person to use. Internet Explorer was released a few weeks after Windows 95. For the first time, millions of people began to use the internet. After 1995, a personal computer revolution began. In the years that followed, the price of computers dropped, and computer ownership skyrocketed. To this day, Microsoft remains one of the largest corporations in the world.

In 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft. Since then, he has focused most of his efforts on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – a philanthropic organization that he set up with his wife in 1994.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is involved in many different fields, including tackling poverty in Washington State, increasing access in the developing world to basic sanitation facilities, educating women, reducing HIV infections and extending the lives of those with that virus, tackling malaria, and working to completely eradicate polio. Since 1994, Bill and Melinda Gates have donated more than $50 billion to a variety of causes.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also created Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, in 2000. Since then, Gavi has helped vaccinate more than 760 million children and has prevented more than 13 million deaths. All in all, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has improved the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people.

During a TED talk in 2015, Gates famously warned that the world was not prepared for the next pandemic. Over the last few years, Gates has spent millions on novel virus preparedness, and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to curb the outbreak. He has recently said that if necessary, he is prepared to invest billions of dollars into building factories for a vaccine.

Gates and his close friend Warren Buffet also created a campaign called The Giving Pledge, which encourages the extremely wealthy to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. So far, 204 people have signed the campaign, pledging a total of $1.2 trillion to charity.

Today, Gates lives with his wife in Washington State. Throughout his life, Gates has received dozens of awards and honors. Time magazine named Gates as one of the most influential people of the 20th century. In 2005, he was given an honorary knighthood by the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II. In 2016, he and his wife Melinda were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gates also holds many honorary doctorates from universities across the world – including from Harvard, from which he dropped out.

Thanks to Bill Gates, computers went from being used almost exclusively by hobbyists who spent hours learning the complex languages necessary to operate a PC, to a vital, easy-to-use product that is utilized by billions of people. And through his philanthropy, Gates has saved tens of millions of lives and helped to improve hundreds of millions more. For these reasons, Bill Gates is rightfully our 50th, and final, Hero of Progress.

Wall Street Journal | Trade & Manufacturing

Amazon Nearly Using More Robots than Humans in Its Warehouses

Jul 1, 2025

“The automation of Amazon facilities is approaching a new milestone: There will soon be as many robots as humans.

The e-commerce giant, which has spent years automating tasks previously done by humans in its facilities, has deployed more than one million robots in those workplaces, Amazon said. That is the most it has ever had and near the count of human workers at the facilities.

Company warehouses buzz with metallic arms plucking items from shelves and wheeled droids that motor around the floors ferrying the goods for packaging. In other corners, automated systems help sort the items, which other robots assist in packaging for shipment.

One of Amazon’s newer robots, called Vulcan, has a sense of touch that enables it to pick items from numerous shelves. Amazon has taken recent steps to connect its robots to its order-fulfillment processes, so the machines can work in tandem with each other and with humans…

Now some 75% of Amazon’s global deliveries are assisted in some way by robotics, the company said. The growing automation has helped Amazon improve productivity, while easing pressure on the company to solve problems such as heavy staff turnover at its fulfillment centers.”

From Wall Street Journal.

World Bank | Food Prices

Global Food Prices Ease amid Improved Supply and Trade

Jun 25, 2025

“Global grain supplies are projected to reach a record 3.6 billion tons in the 2025-26 season, marking a third consecutive year of growth—though at a slower pace than the average annual growth of the preceding two decades. Wheat supply has returned to its long-term average growth rate, while maize supply has rebounded after recent setbacks but remains below its historical trend. In contrast, supplies of rice and soybeans are projected to grow at about their long-term growth averages, building on last season’s significantly elevated levels.”

From World Bank.

Blog Post | Manufacturing

Grim Old Days: Virginia Postrel’s Fabric of Civilization

Beneath today’s abundance of clothing lies a long and brutal history.

Chelsea Follett — Jun 10, 2025

Summary: Virginia Postrel’s book weaves a sweeping history of textiles as both drivers of innovation and toil. From ancient women spinning for months to make a single garment to brutal sumptuary laws and dye trades steeped in labor and odor, it is revealed how fabric shaped the foundations of human society.

Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is the riveting story of how humanity’s quest for thread, cloth, and clothing built modern civilization, by motivating achievements from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution and more. While much of the book contains inspiring tales of innovation, artistry, and entrepreneurship, the parts of the book about the preindustrial era also reveal some dark and disturbing facts about the past.

In the preindustrial era, clothing was often painstakingly produced at home. Postrel estimates that, in Roman times, it took a woman about 909 hours—or 114 days, almost 4 months—to spin enough wool into yarn for a single toga. With the later invention of the spinning wheel, the time needed to produce yarn for a similarly sized garment dropped to around 440 hours, or 50 days. Even in the 18th century, on the eve of industrialization, Yorkshire wool spinners using the most advanced treadle spinning wheels of the time would have needed 14 days to produce enough yarn for a single pair of trousers. Today, by contrast, spinning is almost entirely automated, with a single worker overseeing machines that are able to produce 75,000 pounds of yarn a year—enough to knit 18 million T-shirts.

Most preindustrial women devoted enormous amounts of time to producing thread, which they learned how to make during childhood. It is not an exaggeration to say, as Postrel does, “Most preindustrial women spent their lives spinning.” This was true across much of the world. Consider Mesoamerica:

At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.

These girls often multitasked while spinning: “preindustrial spinners could work while minding children or tending flocks, gossiping or shopping, or waiting for a pot to boil.” The near-constant nature of the task meant that prior to the Industrial Revolution, “industry’s visual representation was a woman spinning thread: diligent, productive, and absolutely essential” to the functioning of society, and from antiquity onward cloth-making was viewed as a key feminine virtue. Ancient Greek pottery portrays spinning “as both the signature activity of the good housewife and something prostitutes do between clients,” showing that women of different social classes were bound to spend much of their lives engaged in this task.

Women of every background worked day and night, but still, their efforts were never enough. “Throughout most of human history, producing enough yarn to make cloth was so time-consuming that this essential raw material was always in short supply.”

Having sufficient spun yarn or thread was only the beginning; it still had to be transformed into cloth. “It took three days of steady work to weave a single bolt of silk, about thirteen yards long, enough to outfit two women in blouses and trousers,” although silk-weavers themselves could rarely afford to wear silk. According to Postrel, a Chinese poem from the year 1145, paired with a painting of a modestly dressed, barefoot peasant weaving silk, suggests that “the couple in damask silk . . . should think of the one who wears coarse hemp.”

Subdued colors often defined the clothing of the masses. “‘Any weed can be a dye,’ fifteenth-century Florentine dyers used to say. But that’s only if you want yellows, browns, or grays—the colors yielded by the flavonoids and tannins common in shrubs and trees.” Other dye colors were harder to produce.

In antiquity, Tyrian purple was a dye derived from crushed sea snails, and the notoriously laborious and foul-smelling production process made it expensive. As a result, it became a status symbol, despite the repulsive stench that clung to the fabric it colored. In fact, according to Postrel, the poet Martial included “a fleece twice drenched in Tyrian dye” in a list of offensive odors, with a joke that a wealthy woman wore the reeking color to conceal her own body odor. The fetor became a status symbol. “Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not an imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.” The color itself was not purple, despite the name, but a dark hue similar to the color of dried blood. Later, during the Renaissance, Italian dyers yielded a bright red from crushed cochineal insects imported from the Americas, as well as other colors that were created by using acidic bran water that was said to smell “like vomit.”

Numerous laws strictly regulated what people were allowed to wear. Italian city-states issued more than 300 sumptuary laws between 1300 and 1500, motivated in part by revenue-hungry governments’ appetite for fines. For example, in the early 1320s, Florence forbade women from owning more than four outfits that were considered presentable enough to wear outside. Postrel quotes the Florentine sumptuary law official Franco Sacchetti as writing that women often ignored the rules and argued with officials until the latter gave up on enforcement; he ends his exasperated account with the saying, “What woman wants the Lord wants, and what the Lord wants comes to pass.” But enough fines were collected to motivate officials to enact ever more restrictions.

In Ming Dynasty China, punishment for dressing above one’s station could include corporal punishment or penal servitude. Yet, as in Florence, and seemingly nearly everywhere that sumptuary laws were imposed, such regulations were routinely flouted, with violators willing to risk punishment or fines. In France in 1726, the authorities harshened the penalty for trafficking certain restricted cotton fabrics, which were made illegal in 1686, to include the death penalty. The French law was not a traditional sumptuary law, but an economic protectionist measure intended to insulate the domestic cloth industry from foreign competition. Postrel quotes the French economist André Morellet lamenting the barbarity of this rule, writing in 1758,

Is it not strange that an otherwise respectable order of citizens solicits terrible punishments such as death and the galleys against Frenchmen, and does so for reasons of commercial interest? Will our descendants be able to believe that our nation was truly as enlightened and civilized as we now like to say when they read that in the middle of the eighteenth century a man in France was hanged for buying [banned cloth] to sell in Grenoble for 58 [coins]?

Despite such disproportionate punishments, the textile-smuggling trade continued.

Postrel’s book exposes the brutal realities woven into the history of textiles; stories not just of uplifting innovation, but of relentless toil, repression, and suffering. Her book fosters a deeper appreciation for the wide range of fabrics and clothes that we now take for granted, and it underscores the human resilience that made such abundance and choice possible.

Curiosities | Trade

The Real Story of the “China Shock”

May 30, 2025

“The total number of jobs remained largely stable in the U.S.—and even slightly increased—as people adapted to competition from Chinese trade. Trade-exposed places recovered after 2010, primarily by adding young-adult workers, foreign-born immigrants, women and the college-educated to service-sector jobs.

Lost in the alarm over jobs is that trade with China delivered substantial benefits to the U.S. economy. Most obvious are the lower prices Americans pay for everything from clothing and electronics to furniture. One study found that a 1 percentage point increase in imports from China led to about a 1.9% drop in consumer prices in the U.S. For every factory job lost to Chinese competition, American consumers in aggregate gained an estimated $411,000 in consumer welfare. This so-called Walmart effect disproportionately helped middle- and lower-income families, who spend a bigger share of their budget on the kinds of cheap goods China excels at producing.

U.S. businesses also reaped advantages. Manufacturers who use imported parts or materials benefited from cheaper inputs, making them more competitive globally. An American appliance company, for example, could buy low-cost Chinese components to lower its production costs, keep its product prices down and potentially hire more workers.”

From Wall Street Journal.