Ten years later, the P-80 Shooting Star became the first jet fighter to enter US operational service (it was based on British technology from the Brit Goblin, and captured technology from the German Me-262):
I remember my grandfather chatting with me about all of the technical innovations that had emerged during his lifetime. This would have been about 1980 or so.
He was born in 1906, and witnessed the advent of nearly every technology of our modern world. He told me that when he was a boy in Sardis, Mississippi, the kids would chase any car that happened down the street, because it was so rare to see one.
He talked about how flying machines, submarines, computers, televisions, the power grid, satellites, manufacturing, skyscrapers, and men on the moon, had all been considered science fiction when he was a boy. He honestly marveled that all of those things, and more, had come to pass, and that they were now the common building blocks of our world.
It was quite a perspective, and made me stop and wonder how things would look to me when I was his age.
I tell you, I’m getting there. Today, I tell my own kids about the differences between the technologies of my youth, and those of the present day. The technologies of my childhood are actually beginning to seem a bit primitive to me now. I can only imagine how they’ll look to me in another twenty years.
My grandfather was born 1899 and grew up in a world where people were not assigned numbers. Telephone calls were made by asking for the Smiths in such and such town, postal service had not yet assigned street addresses, I don’t believe there were social security numbers yet.
I tell my own kids about the differences between the technologies of my youth …
Same here. When I talk with young friends – 20 somethings – they often wonder how we did it. Only three TV stations? My nephew has a gadget on his Harley that holds 20,000 tunes, I had a stack of single song 45s. Today they all have smart phones, we had a party line. When I first went on the internet I was amazed that I could communicate with people all over the world, my daughter just said, “So? It’s done with computers.”
My father saw the first automobile in town. Before he died he saw man walk on the moon.
Something to consider; The greatest periods of technology adoption and development occurred in times of least government intrusion. The automobile was around but was not widely in use until the twenties. In the same period air conditioning, airplanes, electrification, radio, sliced bread, the home refrigerator, and even zippers were brought into general use. The next great technology explosion was in the eighties when computer technology took off and influenced almost everything we use.
My question is how much advancement has been lost due to the meddling nature of government? Would we be using the flying car now had it not been for the government tinkering with the economy?
something to think about.
Ten years later, the P-80 Shooting Star became the first jet fighter to enter US operational service (it was based on British technology from the Brit Goblin, and captured technology from the German Me-262):
I’m 50, so I’ve seen the advent of cable TV, cell phones and the internet. I can imagine life without cell phones and cable, but not the internet.
My Great-grandpa was the same. He was born in 1868, eight years old when Custer got killed, eighteen when Geronomo was raising hell in Arizona, Saw the invention of movies, Tanks, planes, radio, telephone, block long computers, automobiles, Hiroshima and Nagasaki lit up, then died the year the B-52 bomber was accepted for service.
I still remember him and the B-52 is still in service.
I was a linotype operator in the print trade back in the ‘50s and knew a typical “little old lady in sneakers” that ran a Heidelberg press. One time she mentioned that her mother had seen Grover Cleveland when she was a child. I asked her to check with her as to what modern invention impressed her the most, thinking of airplanes, radios, TV, etc.
The next day she said, “You’re not gonna believe this. She said that it was the fact that people could water their lawns. She grew up in a Nebraska sod buster home and said they prayed every day for rain for their crops or face starvation - and now people could just walk outside and turn the tap to water grass.”
One forgets about the simple things.
A few years ago, I read an account by a woman who had asked her grandmother what she considered the greatest technological achievement of her lifetime.
She expected the answer to be something like telephones, or airplanes, or spaceflight.
The actual answer was “hot, running water”.