IN OUR TIME

 

Just imagine! A radio you could carry with you wherever you went!

That was the big technological trend when I was a kid. Transistors were the modern miracle that made it possible—no more bulky vacuum diode tubes and clunky electrical connections. This was the gateway to printed circuits.

But even a few years before the transistor changed the face of electronics, there was the very first “portable” (the new buzzword) radio. Indeed, it came onto the market the year I was born, halfway through the twentieth century, a crazy invention called the Man from Mars Radio Hat, and it was so innovative that it made the cover of Radio-Craft Magazine (later called Radio-Electronics and published from 1929 to 2003). The cover shows a picture of a bright-eyed girl wearing what looks like a white hunter’s red pith helmet, with built-in headphones, two diode tubes in the manner of alien antennae, a tuning dial and a circular metal radio antenna. As long as she had her hat with her, she could listen to the radio wherever she went!

It seemed utterly miraculous to us, who were accustomed to listening to Amos and Andy or The Shadow, or The Bickersons on the radio-record-player console in the living room or, during breakfast, hearing the morning news on the “small” tube-operated Philco that sat on top of the fridge. A radio that you could carry around? Wonderful. We were amazed that a radio could be so small yet so effective! And by the time I was a pre-teen, somewhat like now when people all go around fiddling with their cell phones, it wasn’t uncommon to see men and boys holding a transistor radio in their hand to listen to a ballgame or a boxing match or for boys and girls to be listening to The Top Forty hits.

I remember when I got my first “portable transistor radio”. It was a Westinghouse. I got it for Christmas. It was only about the size and weight of half a brick with a tinny-sounding built-in speaker and leather case. It had a tuning dial on the right with which to change stations, and a matching dial type on/off and volume switch on the left. It ran on batteries, the double-A size known back then as “penlight batteries” because before that their main use was as a power source for small pocket flashlights. Now these small batteries would have a rebirth as the go-to power source for miniaturized electronic devices. 

Something I’ve started to notice as I’ve gotten old(er) is how you end up carrying a lot of everyday history around with you. The more benevolent of young people who don’t ignore you completely or think you’re an idiot because you’re not up to date with the latest trends will sometimes see you as somehow “wise” because you “know stuff” about the past. But at this age, a lot of what you know is simply experience, because you were there when it happened. As the old Spanish expression goes, “The Devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the Devil.”

However, those of us born in the mid-twentieth century or before have lived in truly distinct times from those of today’s twenty, thirty and forty-somethings. Some people will say that “every generation says that,” but in the case of the boomer generation, it has not been the gradual progress that we saw between my parents’ generation and my own. It has instead been a “quantum leap”, an explosion of creative and inventive energy the likes of which the world has never known before. Whether that’s all good or all bad is a matter of opinion, but to my mind there are inventions and developments that have vastly improved our lives—and when I say “our”, I’m referring to reasonably middle-class people of the Western world, since the world’s least privileged people are still living pretty much as their ancestors did a couple of centuries ago—and others that we could probably have done better without, in terms of our awareness, humanity, and physical and mental health.

I suppose the difference between my generation and the one to follow is closer to the gap between mine and my grandparents’ generations. For instance, both of my grandfathers were born in the late eighteen-nineties. It was still a time when humans were attempting to fly for the first time and people like my grandfathers’ fathers were saying, “If God had meant Man to fly, He’d have given him wings.” But on December 17, 1903, Ohio boys Wilbur and Orville Wright made four brief flights at chilly, windy Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the longest of which was eight hundred fifty-two feet at an altitude of about ten feet and at a ground speed of about ten miles an hour. They thus laid claim, if arguably, to having invented the first successful engine-powered aircraft, and opened the gates to the rapid development of America’s aviation industry.

By the time my grandfathers were in their teens, aircraft were flying combat missions during World War I. Before they were thirty, Charles Lindberg had flown a plane non-stop across the Atlantic. But already half a decade before that there were limited commercial passenger services for short flights like London to Paris. And by the nineteen-thirties there were regular passenger services to destinations around the world. The thirties also witnessed the invention of jet propulsion, which expanded to widespread military and commercial use over the next two decades.

One small step for a man...

In their fifties and sixties my two grandfathers were witnesses to the era of “the jet set” and learned of it through the magic of television which hadn’t existed before they were middle-aged. And by the time they reached their early seventies, Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon—although no one is a prophet in his or her own land, and since Neil was from my hometown of Wapakoneta, it wasn’t surprising that one of my granddads opined that “The Armstrong kid always was a damned liar and is in cahoots with the government to fool everybody with some movin’ picture they cooked up with Hollywood.” Nobody, he claimed, had ever reached the moon, and nobody ever would.

We laughed about this behind his back at the time but understood that for a man who had ridden a horse for transportation growing up and who hadn’t had electric light until he was in his thirties, when rural electrification became widespread, the idea of someone walking on the moon—especially someone from our own town—was simply too fantastic for him to wrap his head around. That said, however, nobody could have made me believe, back in 1969, that there would still be people in 2021 who would be claiming that the moon landing was a hoax. But here we are.

Since then, nevertheless, there has been a constant global storm of technological advancement, all through my adult life. Things we take for granted today and that we find indispensable to our daily lives simply didn’t exist when I was born. For instance: the Internet and World Wide Web, or, hence, social media, digital anything, cassettes, DVDs, CDs, floppy disks, pen drives, VCRs,  jet airliners, color TV (it came along while I was in grade school), calculators, cordless phones (cordless anything), cellphones, microwave ovens, personal computers, laptops, Notebooks (except loose-leaf and spiral), tablets (except the yellow lined paper kind), McDonald’s or any other fast food chains (not before I was in grade school), pacemakers, heart by-pass surgery or transplants of any kind, Microsoft, Apple, cable TV (we had three channels in black and white and thought it was magic), satellite TV, printed circuits, radial tires, remote controls, garage door openers, a vaccine for polio, diet drinks, health food, frozen yogurt, compact cars, SUVs, automobile seatbelts, airbags, food processors, electric coffee-makers, nuclear power, solar energy, wind power, ultrasound, stereophonic records, nano-technology...and the list goes on and on. Most of these miracles that we enjoy and take for granted today are the product of highly focused and extensive research and development, but some were just flukes.

Take the microwave, which didn’t arrive in our house until I was in college. I still remember how much fun it was for my mother, Reba Mae, to stick a cup of water in there and have it warm up to a boil in seconds with no direct heat applied, or how her younger brother, Uncle Kenny, would say, “Well, I guess it’s about time for me to go home and explode me some eggs for supper.” It was a discovery of Percy Spencer, a scientist at the defense giant, Raytheon, who, in 1945, was experimenting with a radar power tube known as a magnetron.

A guy who loved his sweets, Percy had a candy bar in his pocket and couldn’t help noticing that while he was standing in front of the magnetron, it melted. Cool! So Percy goes and gets some popcorn and places it on a counter in front of the magnetron. And, snap-crackle-pop, all of the sudden there’s popcorn all over the lab. 

It took him a decade to do it, but in 1955, Percy patented what he called “the radar range”, a stove that cooked with high-frequency radio waves. Later that same year, the radar range was off the drawing board and the Tappan Stove Company had marketed the very first home microwave oven.

Another invention that was a fluke was the heart Pacemaker.  In 1956, when I was seven, scientist Wilson Greatbatch was hard at work trying to invent a device to record heartbeats. He got distracted at some point, picked up the wrong resistor from his work bench and installed it in the circuitry for his invention. This made the device emit rather than record a pulse. In that eureka moment, Wilson’s focus suddenly changed from recording pulse rate to controlling it and four years later, when I turned eleven, the first Pacemaker was installed in a human heart.

Wilson Greatbatch with his Pacemaker

It’s no wonder we were all so impressed with how “small” our transistor radios were. Consider this: In 1956, IBM created the first hard drive computer. The mainframe unit known as the 305 RAMAC weighed a cool ton—literally, two thousand pounds. Back then, if you had told people they would one day have computers at home and in their pockets that were millions of times more powerful than the mainframes at the Department of Defense and the Pentagon, they’d have said, “Yeah, right, and we’ll all fly to the moon for lunch and eat green cheese,” before laughing you out of the room.  Nor would we have believed anyone—the day Wapakoneta’s native son Neil walked on the moon in 1969, and we thought we had reached the cosmic heights of human sophistication—who tried to convince us that, in our lifetime, we would be carrying around miniature computers called smartphones that would be millions of times more complex and powerful than the one that guided Apollo 11 to the lunar surface.

Putting finishing touches on Telstar I

So much for the incredulous. Sci-fi authors have long been predicting the future. For example, in 1945, four years before I was born, sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke published a proposal in Wireless World Magazine, in which he envisioned a global communications network based on geosynchronous satellites. In 1962, when I turned thirteen, the US launched the first active telecommunications satellite, Telstar. Two weeks after it was unveiled, President John F. Kennedy held a press conference in Washington that Telstar broadcast live to Europe.

In 1967, a year before I graduated from high school, eminent Argentine heart surgeon Rene Favaloro, at the time working for Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, took a length of vein from a cardiac patient’s leg and grafted it onto a blocked artery. The blood was thus able to flow around the blockage and save the patient’s life. The process—today a common solution for heart blockages—became known as “the coronary by-pass” and was largely responsible for a drop of nearly fifty percent in deaths from heart disease in the US. Dr. Favaloro, for his part, returned home to Argentina four years later—two years before I myself moved there “for a year”—where he had started out as a rural general practitioner. There, he eventually opened in Buenos Aires one of the world’s most prestigious cardiology clinics and became one of the country’s best-loved heroes.

Favaloro, King of Hearts

And speaking of medical advances, mine was the generation of the polio epidemic, a cruel virus also known as “infantile paralysis” because it mostly affected the very young leaving the victims that it didn’t kill in varying states of paralysis from partial to complete immobility for life.

Through truly inspired research, by 1955, when I was six, Doctor Jonas Salk, who for the previous half decade had been studying poliovirus variants, had developed the “inactivated poliovirus vaccine.” Described as a fear that Americans ranked second only to the possibility of nuclear holocaust, polio became the target of one of the most incredible US and worldwide mobilizations in history, with Salk, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, receiving funding from numerous sources, but principally from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which would morph into The March of Dimes, one of the most successful fundraising efforts in history.

Salk, the man who cured polio

Just as ambitious was the immunization process, involving in the trial stage alone some twenty thousand doctors and other medical personnel, sixty-four thousand public school staffers and two hundred twenty thousand volunteers. In a subsequent trial before general application of the vaccine, 1.8 million schoolchildren were vaccinated. And, in short order, through the monumental effort of every segment of society, within a year virtually every schoolchild, and eventually their parents as well, had been vaccinated, as were children around the world.

It’s hard to stress enough what a miracle not only the vaccine but the cooperation of everyone concerned in the immunization process was. In this age of COVID-deniers, anti-vaxxers and foot-dragging politicians, it's interesting to note that while COVID-19 has infected millions and killed over half a million people in the US alone, by the time Salk had created his vaccine and virtually everyone had cooperated to get it into arms all around the world, “only” three thousand one hundred forty-five people had died and twenty-one thousand two hundred sixty-nine had been left with crippling effects of the disease in the US. When the worldwide vaccination campaign began in 1955, there were about twenty-two thousand—that’s right, two twos and three zeros—reported cases worldwide. By the following year, thanks to vaccination, cases were down to fifteen thousand, and by 2017 the worldwide total of new cases was twenty-two. So for all of our extraordinary technological advances of the past half-century, our sense of solidarity has apparently not kept pace. Not by a longshot.

Which brings me to the final point that I’ve been thinking about. Perhaps with such vast and almost daily “progress” we have become numb to the miracles around us. Maybe in our race to have the latest technology we’ve fallen victim to the idea that nothing is amazing anymore and that anything and everything can be solved with the latest software. Perhaps we have become immune to awe, cynical about the fundamental importance of joint human effort in creating a better world. And that said, perhaps too, we have become so ironically isolated at a time that we have never been more connected that the idea of pesonal, national and global solidarity appears to us to be a naïve and outdated concept—something to be snorted at.

But if the current state of hostility between neighbors, our failure to protect our environment (the most incredible miracle of all) and the disaster that the COVID-19 pandemic has been are anything to go by, isn’t it maybe time we brought solidarity and cooperation back? And isn’t it high time we recalled the meaning of the word “awestruck” and stopped giving a whole new and negative meaning to the word “dumbstruck”?