Marshall McLuhan

Born in Winnipeg in 1911, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge before teaching English at universities across the U.S. and Canada. In 1946 he landed at the University of Toronto and stayed put. There he wrote Understanding Media and coined "the medium is the message" and "global village" — phrases that made him a media-circuit fixture in the late 1960s. By the early '70s his influence had cooled, and he died in 1980 with his reputation still contested in academic circles. Then the internet arrived, and suddenly the man who predicted the World Wide Web three decades early…