But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
—Daniel 12:4
4797 Wright’s Father Knocks Down Flight
“The millenium is at hand. Man has invented everything that can be invented. He has done all he can do.”
These words were spoken by a bishop at a church gathering in 1870. They were challenged by the presiding officer, who suggested that a great invention would be made within the next fifty years.
The bishop asked him to name such an invention.
The reply: “I think man will learn to fly.”
The bishop replied that this was blasphemy. “Don’t you know that flight is reserved for angels?”
The bishop was Milton Wright, father of Orville and Wilbur.
4798 Enter Baby Carriages
The first baby carriage was made by Charles Burton in 1884 and used in New York City. People in those days protested violently that the carriage was dangerous to pedestrians!
4799 Those Spectacles Did It
When “Boss” Kettering, for years Vice-President of General Motors and director of their research laboratories, was just beginning his inventive career in Ashland, Ohio, he worked out a central-battery telephone exchange which did away with the nuisance of cranking the phone in rural communities. It seemed like a huge success but at one point it was in danger of being scrapped because for about two hours every afternoon the whole thing went dead.
Kettering worked frantically for several weeks to locate the trouble. He finally discovered that out on one of the farms a certain grandfather had the habit of laying his spectacles on top of the telephone box every afternoon while he took a nap, thus short-circuiting system.
4800 Hindrances Every Step
After the wheel was invented, some cave dwellers undoubtedly complained that ruts would ruin the footpaths. In the 1840s, farmers of New York’s Suffold Country rebelled against another recent invention; they tore up railway tracks, put to torch the depots and caused wrecks by loosening rail ties. The iron horse was evil, they complained; its sparks set fields afire, its bells and noisy clatter shocked cows into withholding milk, and its soot soiled laundry. Decades later, the first autos were denounced for scaring horses and for spewing objectionable fumes …
—Time
4801 Toilets On The Go
Washington (AFP)—The Smithsonian Institute, the leading US technical museum, has launched a new exhibition covering the period from the open-air latrines of the early pioneers to ultra-modern bathrooms, equipped with telephone.
The exhibition is composed of a series of photographs fixed to the doors of the lavatories in the museum.
4802 That First Bathtub
The first bathtub in America brought objections from doctors and politicians. It was built in Cincinnati in 1842 and first exhibited at a Christmas party.
The next day, the local papers denounced it as a “luxurious and democratic vanity.” Doctors warned that the bathtub would be “a menace to health.” The politicians also took up the fight. Philadelphia issued a public ordinance to prohibit bathing between November 1 and March 15. Boston made bathing unlawful except when prescribed by a physician. One state even levied a $30-a-year tax on every bathtub, and several cities increased water rates for such use.
The first bathtubs were encased in mahogany and lined with sheet metal, in size seven feet long and four feet wide. It weighed 1750 pounds. And water had to be pumped into it.
4803 Olds’ Farewell Car
Whenever I think of the future, I think of R. E. Olds who made the Oldsmobile and the Reo cars. About 1902 he announced a new model which he called his Farewell Car. He implied that this automobile was the ultimate, that after it, nobody could ever bring improvement to the motorcar. How wrong he was! There’s always more to be done. You can never catch up. You can never finish.
—Brooks Steven
4804 The Last Explorer?
Admiral Byrd, the explorer, one day was passing through the lobby of a hotel when a large company of people commenced cheering him. Two men were joining in the salutation, when one was overheard remarking to the other: “He is the last of the explorers; there is nothing left for the rest of us to explore.”
—Sunshine Magazine
4805 “No More Inventions”
Henry J. Ellsworth, commissioner of the U.S. Patent office, assured people that his resignation was really of no great concern. “Mankind,” he declared, “has already achieved all of which it is capable. There would be no more inventions requiring patents.”
The year was 1844—before the steamboat, the telegraph cable under the ocean, the electric light, the telephone, and a host of other inventions that came along during the next half-century.
4806 Closing Patent Office
And then in the early 1870’s, the U.S. Congress became greatly alarmed over the size of the federal budget, and determined to cut it. Finally a senator arose to announce a solution. It seems that he had been investigating the Patent Office. After noting the staggering total of entries in the records, he had concluded that it would be impossible to invent anything else. Therefore, they might as well discontinue the Patent Office, and appropriate no more money for it. The savings here would provide the desired decrease in the federal budget.
4807 An Early Telephone Man Arrested
This clipping from a Boston newspaper in 1872: “A man about forty-six years of age, giving the name of Joshua Coppersmith, has been arrested in New York for allegedly attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people. He exhibited a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires, so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end of the wire. He calls the instrument a “telephone,” which is obviously intended to imitate the word “telegraph,” thus winning the confidence of those who know the success of the latter instrument without understanding the principles on which it is based.
“Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires, as may be done with dots and dashes and signals of the Morse code and, that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value. Authorities who apprehended this criminal are to be congratulated, and it is hoped that his punishment will be prompt and fitting.”
4808 Czar Banned Progress
When Nicholas I became Czar of Russia, he attempted to shut off his country from all intercourse with the outside world. A historian summarized the results of the Tsar’s attitude: “Russians were forbidden to travel abroad. Nicholas referred to the Moscow University as a “den of wolves,” and restricted the number of students to three hundred.”
Censors struck out of papers such phrases as “Forces of nature” and “movements of minds.” Nicholas himself was enraged at finding the word “progress” used in a report of one of his ministers and demanded its deletion from all future official documents. But progress could not thus be staved off.
—Donald Grey Barnhouse
4809 When Men Are Free
Less than a hundred years ago the human voice could be delivered the distance that one champion hog-caller could effectively communicate with another champion hog-caller, which I have estimated at about forty-four yards. Since that time man, acting freely, privately, competitively, voluntarily, has discovered how to deliver the human voice around the earth in 1/27th of a second—one million times as far, and in one-third the time, that the voice of one hog-caller reached the ear of the other.
When men were free to try, they found out how to deliver an event like the Rose Bowl game in motion and in color into your living room while it is going on. When men were free to try, they found out how to deliver 115 individuals from Los Angeles to Baltimore in three hours and thirty-nine minutes. When men are free to try, they deliver gas from a hole in the ground in Texas to Irvington, New York, without subsidy and at low prices.
Men who are free to try have discovered how to deliver sixty-four ounces of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern seaboard, more than half the way around the world—a million times further than delivering a letter across the street—at a cost below that of a first-class letter! And the people who accomplish these miracles have lost faith in their capacity to deliver a letter, which is a Boy Scout job. You may get the idea that I have faith in free men and not in government.
—Sunshine Magazine
4810 A Congressional Tradition
At the start of each Congress, every Congressman is entitled to be issued one comb, one hairbrush, and a trunk or footlocker. Back in stagecoach days a man had to have a good strongbox to send his possessions home in at the end of the session. They’re still giving them out, and those who have been there a long time could build a pretty good-sized wall with them all.
—News-Review, New York
4811 Bequests To Stagnancy
There is an endowment for woolcarders. But there have been no woolcarders for 150 years, and the fund is still accumulating in the banks. Another endowment provides for the ransom of American seamen held by Barbary pirates on the North African coast. One will provide for an endowed lectureship at an American University on the Use of Coal gas as a cure for malarial fever! An endowment dated 1683 provided for “the relief of seven aged Protestants in the county of Cork, Ireland.” For the past 50 years the trustees have been unable to find seven Protestants of any kind in all the county of Cork!
—Christian Victory
4812 Time Capsule
Writer Lincoln Barnett once described the excitement of a group of students emerging from a physics lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. “How did it go?” one of them was asked. “Wonderful!” he replied. “Everything we knew last week isn’t true.”
It is barely 60 years since the first flying machine wobbled into the air, less than eight years since the first artificial satellite burst the shackles of earth’s atmosphere. Yet in just five years—the time that I’ve been observing satellites as a serious hobby—more than 500 of the manmade devices have rocketed into space.
—Larry Dean Howard
4813 Wanted: Men Without Experience
Reader’s Digest reprinted an advertisement which was originally published, deadpan, in the Mines Magazine. The ad read: “Wanted: man to work on nuclear fissionable isotope molecular reactive counters and three-phase cyclotronic uranium photosynthesizers. No experience necessary.”
And there is as much truth as humor in that, too. For how do you find experienced men in a field that never existed before? Yet, these new fields are opening up every day, with new products and new processes that will again be obsolete tomorrow.
—Roger M. Blough
4814 Progress And The Light Bulb
Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric light bulb in 1879. Twenty-two years later, in 1901, one of the newfangled gadgets was hung and turned on in the Livermore, Calif., Fire Department. It’s still there, and still on. The old bulb has almost never been turned off in 71 years.
By today’s standards it should have burned out 852 times by now. The bulb, hand-blown, with a thick carbon filament, was made, it is said, by the Shelby Electric Company, which did not become one of the giants of the nation, for an obvious reason. The Shelby Company made light bulbs to last, and nobody ever reordered.
The bulb is accorded an awesome respect by Fire Captain Kirby Slate and his men. In a time of planted and planned obsolescence, when gadgets are forever falling apart or burning out or breaking up, it’s reassuring to watch a dusty 71-year-old light bulb shine on and on and on.
—Charles Kuralt
4815 First-Grade Talk
The first-graders were visiting the airport. As the roaring planes landed and took off the teacher remarked to the class. “Isn’t it wonderful that we have so many airplanes and, just think, a few years ago we didn’t even have automobiles.” One curious youngster piped up, “How did people get to the airports?”
4816 The 21st Century
New York (UPI)—The 21st century will produce a cancer-preventing drug, accident-free automobiles and plastics that are good to eat, McGraw-Hill forecasters said.
Other marvels of the 21st-century forecast included:
—The virtual elimination of aircraft noise.
—A non-petroleum aircraft fuel.
—Solar energy for most heating.
McGraw-Hill also predicted drugs that will cure mental illnesses, chemical substitutes for blood, and drugs that will partly control heredity.
Turning to mechanical things, the study said automobiles will be made largely of plastics, except for the power train, and will be much safer and almost service-free.
4817 National Nostalgia Convention
Loaded with old comic books and radio tapes from the 1930s, some five hundred people flowed into Tempe, Arizona, for a three-day national nostalgia convention. The conclave featured comicbook collectors who swapped “Captain Marvel” for “Superman No. 1” or simply paid up to $200 for a rare copy of the first “Batman” series. They also watched movies from the silent screen era and listened to radio broadcasts from the thirties and forties.
—C. R. Hembree
4818 Tagged Salmon In Can
The Department of Fisheries in the State of Washington tags salmon in order to learn more about their migratory habits. It pays three dollars for the return of each tag with information as to where it was found. Alan Janofsky of New York City dutifully returned a tag with this explanatory note:
“Enclosed is a tag that came off a salmon. I found it when I bit into my sandwich. It came to me in a can of salmon. Please send the $3.”
—Sports Illustrated
4819 Penicillin And Modern Labs
Sir Alexander Fleming made his discovery of penicillin while working in a dusty old laboratory. A mold spore, blown in through a window, landed on a culture plate he was about to examine.
Some years later, he was taken on a tour of an up-to-date research lab, a gleaming, air-conditioned, dust-free, super-sterile setting. “What a pity you did not have a place like this to work in,” his guide said. “What you could have discovered in such surroundings!”
“Not penicillin,” Fleming observed dryly.
—E. E. Edgar.
4820 Epigram On Progress
• Restlessness and discontent are the first neccessities of progress.
—Thomas A. Edison
• The world’s moving so fast, the man who says it can’t be done is interrupted by someone doing it.
—Elbert Hubbard
• “lf it works it is obsolete,” is a common saying at the Pentagon. This is but a facetious recognition of the rapidity of change in an era of unprecented discovery and development.
—L. Nelson Bell
• We will make electric light so cheap that only the rich will be able to burn candles.
—Edison
• If the old-fashioned family doctor has disappeared, perhaps it’s because he’s out looking for the old-fashioned family.
—Burton Hillis
• In this day of almost total dependence on mechanical gadgets, a Min neapolis supermarket has found it necessary to put this warning on its entrance: “Caution. No Automatic Door.”
—Minneapolis Tribune
See also: Technology.