As one not-so-ancient myth goes, a commissioner at the US Patent Office declared around the turn of the 20th century that the patent office should be closed because everything that could possibly be invented, had. While an absurd concept, the idea of a creative "plateau" sometime in the future of humanity does raise some interesting thoughts. When I began to consider it, I naturally thought first about time travel.
Several hundred centuries after the first rockets were successfully used in Asia as a weapon in the fighting between China and Mongolia, but still a couple centuries before rocket propulsion was subjected to scientific study for use in transportation, the late 15th century ushered in the genius of the original Renaissance Man Leonardo da Vinci. Though today we recognize the obvious benefits of rocket propulsion, in Leonardo's day two of the most advanced flight machines he envisioned were a hang glider and a helicopter that was little more than a chair attached to a giant corkscrew. No powered transportation there.
Fast-forward two to three hundred years. Inventors began engineering steam-powered external combustion engines that eventually became both catalysts for and staples of the Industrial Revolution, finding their way into mines, factories, locomotion, and the evolutionary field of electric power. Some even toyed with the idea of an internal combustion engine that ran on liquid fuels such as gas, but toys is all they were.
Made possible by the Industrial Revolution, the budding automobile industry around the turn of the 20th century finally brought wild commercial success to those gas engines, which also happened to be on board the first powered airplane and several years later the helicopter (could Leonardo have imagined this?). To this day internal combustion engines power many of our most impressive machines that don't use electricity, nuclear power, or rocket power which can finally fling stuff into outer space.
Once I wrapped up my foray into historical time travel, I wondered what it would be like to transport someone from any century since the Renaissance into any subsequent era. I used to think that their reaction to the future would be "Of course! That seems so obvious I can't believe we didn't think of it before!" But my, how wrong I think I was.
Simply put, I think transporting someone into the future would be a total mind-bender. Just look at how confused your parents get when it comes to figuring out Facebook. That is something a 7-year-old could master with no sweat, but imagine trying to explain "the cloud" to a brilliant mind like that of Thomas Edison, who lived just last century:
Modern person: "The 'cloud' is a group of intelligent electrical machines called computers that store your information remotely so you can access it instantly from anywhere in the world."
Edison: "What kind of information?"
"Stuff like your passwords, credit card numbers, and email addresses."
"What are those?"
"Passwords are electronic keys that allow you to verify your identity in a virtual world called the Internet. Credit card numbers allow merchants to take out instantaneous, paperless loans in your name for everyday purchases you make, so you don't have to exchange or convert physical money. Email addresses are destinations in the virtual world where you can send an electronic letter, like a sophistocated telegraph that can transmit to any location you want."
"Wow. So what's the Internet?"
"Something a politician claims he invented in the 1990s."
"O...K.... So how does it work?"
"It's like the interstate highway system. You can get information like letters, movies like those on your kinescope, and recorded audio like that from your dictaphone from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else at the speed of light using electrical impulses and radio waves."
"Awesome! What's the interstate highway system?"
"Something we built in the US in the 1960s after the second World War. Germany had something called the Audubon that Adolf Hitler built as a high-speed road for automobiles and secretly doubled as an emergency landing strip for bomber planes in case their military bases were blown up."
"Airplanes are weapons now? We had another World War? I think I'm having a heart attack."
And so the future killed Thomas Edison.
While we're at it, why not try to explain a microwave oven to Isaac Newton? I'm sure he'd pick up pretty quickly on atom theory, AC power, microprocessors, radio physics, and what buttons to press to get the cussed thing to turn on without burning his popcorn.
We live in an awesome age of technology, and can be rightly proud of the strides society has taken in the last couple of decades to improve health, communications, commerce, and the standards of living around the world. Nevertheless, I think history has shown that we have a great track record for improving ourselves beyond our wildest dreams, and I am truly yet blindly excited to see what innovations we make in the decades to come.
Several hundred centuries after the first rockets were successfully used in Asia as a weapon in the fighting between China and Mongolia, but still a couple centuries before rocket propulsion was subjected to scientific study for use in transportation, the late 15th century ushered in the genius of the original Renaissance Man Leonardo da Vinci. Though today we recognize the obvious benefits of rocket propulsion, in Leonardo's day two of the most advanced flight machines he envisioned were a hang glider and a helicopter that was little more than a chair attached to a giant corkscrew. No powered transportation there.
Fast-forward two to three hundred years. Inventors began engineering steam-powered external combustion engines that eventually became both catalysts for and staples of the Industrial Revolution, finding their way into mines, factories, locomotion, and the evolutionary field of electric power. Some even toyed with the idea of an internal combustion engine that ran on liquid fuels such as gas, but toys is all they were.
Made possible by the Industrial Revolution, the budding automobile industry around the turn of the 20th century finally brought wild commercial success to those gas engines, which also happened to be on board the first powered airplane and several years later the helicopter (could Leonardo have imagined this?). To this day internal combustion engines power many of our most impressive machines that don't use electricity, nuclear power, or rocket power which can finally fling stuff into outer space.
Once I wrapped up my foray into historical time travel, I wondered what it would be like to transport someone from any century since the Renaissance into any subsequent era. I used to think that their reaction to the future would be "Of course! That seems so obvious I can't believe we didn't think of it before!" But my, how wrong I think I was.
Simply put, I think transporting someone into the future would be a total mind-bender. Just look at how confused your parents get when it comes to figuring out Facebook. That is something a 7-year-old could master with no sweat, but imagine trying to explain "the cloud" to a brilliant mind like that of Thomas Edison, who lived just last century:
Modern person: "The 'cloud' is a group of intelligent electrical machines called computers that store your information remotely so you can access it instantly from anywhere in the world."
Edison: "What kind of information?"
"Stuff like your passwords, credit card numbers, and email addresses."
"What are those?"
"Passwords are electronic keys that allow you to verify your identity in a virtual world called the Internet. Credit card numbers allow merchants to take out instantaneous, paperless loans in your name for everyday purchases you make, so you don't have to exchange or convert physical money. Email addresses are destinations in the virtual world where you can send an electronic letter, like a sophistocated telegraph that can transmit to any location you want."
"Wow. So what's the Internet?"
"Something a politician claims he invented in the 1990s."
"O...K.... So how does it work?"
"It's like the interstate highway system. You can get information like letters, movies like those on your kinescope, and recorded audio like that from your dictaphone from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else at the speed of light using electrical impulses and radio waves."
"Awesome! What's the interstate highway system?"
"Something we built in the US in the 1960s after the second World War. Germany had something called the Audubon that Adolf Hitler built as a high-speed road for automobiles and secretly doubled as an emergency landing strip for bomber planes in case their military bases were blown up."
"Airplanes are weapons now? We had another World War? I think I'm having a heart attack."
And so the future killed Thomas Edison.
While we're at it, why not try to explain a microwave oven to Isaac Newton? I'm sure he'd pick up pretty quickly on atom theory, AC power, microprocessors, radio physics, and what buttons to press to get the cussed thing to turn on without burning his popcorn.
We live in an awesome age of technology, and can be rightly proud of the strides society has taken in the last couple of decades to improve health, communications, commerce, and the standards of living around the world. Nevertheless, I think history has shown that we have a great track record for improving ourselves beyond our wildest dreams, and I am truly yet blindly excited to see what innovations we make in the decades to come.
