Apostles of Truth and Science. The Amsterdammers who changed the world

The cleverest, the brightest, the most gifted Amsterdammers — the ones who were first

Amsterdam is a city where ideas are born that change the world.

We will set off along the paths of the people who made it so: scholars, artists, entrepreneurs and thinkers whose discoveries and decisions had an effect far beyond the Netherlands. New rules of the game took shape here: in science, in finance, in art, and in the very way of thinking.

You will see the city through those who created its character, and you will understand why Amsterdam became the place where freedom of thought turns into strength.

This is a tour about people who were ahead of their time. And about ideas that have stayed with us to this day.

These two lecturers at the University of Amsterdam were both the heroes of student jokes and respected scholars among the venerable European professoriate at the same time. And one of them was the author of an entire concept that became a genuine charter for the Amsterdam trading elite.

An absolutely brilliant scholar and the son of a brilliant politician. A physicist and astronomer who, in his seventeenth century, reached the rings of Saturn and made sure that Dutch navigators could always calculate the coordinates they needed with complete accuracy. He also made a supposition in physics that could only be confirmed in the twentieth century.

A man who embodied Amsterdam’s brilliant seventeenth century: a talented and very popular painter and, at the same time, an engineer and inventor, a brilliant visionary and organiser. It is to him that the world owes the appearance of an entire modern system of firefighting — and of something else, very useful and very familiar to us.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was the centre of world painting; everyone knows that. But not by painting alone. Drama and poetry flourished in abundance. Our hero, who wrote about love with genius, lived a very short life — only thirty-three years. Yet not only the memory of him, but his literary characters too, outlived the centuries, and even have their own monuments in the very heart of the city.

The portrait of this lady hangs in the lobby of the Dutch National Bank. Why? Because she once saved that bank — and with it the whole Dutch economy. Because she was the finest financier of her time and the richest person in the country, who earned her fortune herself. Because she was brilliant and decisive. But those were not all of her talents.

A giant of thought and the father of Dutch democracy — that is one way to describe our hero. Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, it was he who stripped the Dutch monarchy — already considerably plucked by the Constitution and Parliament — of what remained of its real power. And not only that.