Living in era of technological breakthroughs

For all the fear, negativity, and derision we hear in the news and on social media, I continue to believe we live in amazing times. Our lives are immeasurably improved by access to increasingly inexpensive, more reliable, more capable technologies.

Don’t believe me? Consider this.

When my grandfather was a boy the technology of his era was not far removed from that of 200 years earlier. Fire was still a primary applied science in most homes. It was used to heat the home, cook their dinner, and light the night.

The same fire used by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. The only real difference was the cast iron stove in the kitchen. Whether it was fed with wood or coal, the goal was to have an open fire in the home on a nearly daily basis.

Tampa Bay was filled with wooden ships. Most were powered by sail, although a growing number were making use of steam power. A variation on the fire-powered stoves at home, steam power allowed ships to move against the current, against the wind, and to make good speed even when the wind was calm. Often, they could cruise as quickly as 5 knots.

Amazing!

Freight moved to and from the port on wagons drawn by horses. It didn’t take an MIT graduate level education to figure out how the wagon worked. It was built almost entirely of wood, including the wheels. Metal strapping bolted or riveted into place helped hold the whole contraption together.

The printing press used by Benjamin Franklin was still practical and in common use in many smaller towns. In large cities where electricity was becoming available, the Linotype machine was introduced. Molten lead was a critical part of the process used to print the daily newspaper.

This was perhaps the most complex machine in town during my granddad’s youth. When he took his first job at the Clearwater News in 1912 as a printer’s devil, he was entering an industry that was considered to be high tech with a bright future.

Radio was rare in 1912. Television didn’t exist. The entire state of Florida held just over 750,000 residents, with Clearwater accounting for roughly 400. And folks thought they were living in the lap of luxury.

The telephone was coming. Electricity was on its way. Running water was available in new homes. Automobiles were beginning to make their way from town to town.

Then the impossible happened. Tony Jannus flew a seaplane across the Bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa, opening up the first scheduled airline service in the world.

What could be better than that?

As any reasonable reader makes his or her way through those previous paragraphs, they would be well within their rights to ask, what does this walk down history lane have to do with me and my life in the 21st Century? Well, I’ll tell you.

My granddad died in 1985 after living for 88 years. The world he departed had little resemblance to the one he entered. His home had cable television. He owned a riding lawn mower with a trailer attachment. No horse and wagon for the elder version of the man. His car had air conditioning, a radio, headlights, and adjustable seats. When he was born, the fort at St. Augustine was still a working military installation. When he died it was a tourist attraction.

This man who was born into a community with no paved roads or casually accepted modern conveniences watched Apollo missions to the moon launch from the beach not far from where he was born. He spent his evening watching a baseball game that was happening hundreds of miles away on his color TV, while talking to a family member a thousand miles distant on a hardwired telephone.

All of these things were impossible to even imagine when he was a boy. All are quaintly nostalgic today.

The world around us changes as the technology of our time carries us forward. The machinery of our time appears to be common and permanent, but that will not always be so — certainly not in the aviation industry where innovation is constant and efficiency is the goal.

There will be a day in the future when your grandchildren may well tell their grandchildren stories of wonder. They will share the experience of when they flew with their dear old grandpa or grandma in an airplane made of steel tubes covered in fabric. They navigated by looking out the window, for goodness sake. And maybe the most unbelievable thing of all, my grandparent let me take the controls and fly the airplane myself. Yes, it’s true! No autopilot. No programming. No fly-by-wire controls at all. In the old days we actually flew the airplanes ourselves.

Knowing this makes me happy. Not that technology will take us to a time when transportation will be automated to a degree where humans are barely necessary to operate the machinery. It makes me happy that I live in a time when we get to personally control the aircraft. We benefit from living early enough in the technological story to guide our own course — literally.

My family, like so many others, left another continent headed for the new world in wooden ships, powered by sails, on journeys that took weeks, if not months.

Those of us who return to the ancestral lands do so in turbine-powered, pressurized tubes traveling at hundreds of miles per hour, several miles up in the sky. The length of our journey is measured in mere hours. We watch a movie or listen to a podcast as we travel. We don’t get cold, or wet, or run short of food along the way. And we think that’s normal. Because it is now. It wasn’t always so.

The future is a beautiful and frightening thing. I’m glad I have the benefit of living a better life thanks to the advances made in my time. I’m equally enthralled to know that I’ll get to have at least a peek into the technologies that will be coming to fruition after I’m gone.

Oh, what an amazing time it is to be alive. As it always has been.