Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines Systems and the Human World
400
Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines Systems and the Human World
400eBook
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Overview
Visions of Technology collects writings on events from the Great Exposition of 1900 and the invention of the telegraph to the advent of genetic counseling and the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. Its gems of opinion and history include Henry Ford on the horseless carriage, Robert Caro on the transformation of New York City, J. Robert Oppenheimer on science and war, Loretta Lynn on the Pill and much more. Together, they chronicle an unprecedented century of change.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781439129555 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 09/18/2012 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
From Part III, POST-WAR BOOM: 1945-1970
WEIGHTLESSNESS
JOHN H. GLENN, JR., 1962
Technology projects human beings into new situations rarely or never experienced before. In the nineteenth century, some observers feared the great speeds that railroading made possible -- fifteen miles per hour and more -- might exceed what the human frame could bear. Orbital spaceflight -- the astronaut continually falling around the earth -- produces extended weightlessness, a condition not previously known on earth. John Glenn recalls the experience from his first historic orbital flight. He fared better than most; more than half the astronauts who followed him into space would experience nausea and vertigo during their first twenty-four hours of weightlessness.
Zanzibar was the next tracking station, and here the flight surgeon who was on duty came on the air to discuss how I was doing physically. I gave him a blood-pressure reading....The doctor also asked me what physical reactions, if any, I had experienced so far from weightlessness. I was able to tell him that there had been none at all; I assured him that I felt fine. I had had no trouble reaching accurately for the controls and switches. There had been no tendency to get awkward and overreach them, as some people had thought there might be. I could hit directly any spot that I wanted to hit. I had an eye chart on board, a small version of the kind you find in doctors' offices, and I had no trouble reading the same line of type each time. After making a few slow movements with my head to see if this brought on a feeling of disorientation, I even tried to induce a little dizzines are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped -- 500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man's war against nature. Since the mid-1940s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names.
These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes -- nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil -- all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit fo r all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides."
...Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm -- substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
Some would-be architects of our future look toward a time when it will be possible to alter the human germ plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now by inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
All this has been risked -- for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the surp lus-food storage program. And is the situation helped when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce production while another states, as it did in 1958, "It is believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops."
All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of control. I am saying, rather, that control must be geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the methods employed must be such that they do not destroy us along with the insects.
HOW LIKE SAILORS THEY WERE
JOHN STEINBECK, 1962
The author of Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and the same year published his genial report on a trip around the U.S. by camper truck, Travels With Charley, from which these observations on the burgeoning interstate highway system and on interstate trucking are taken.
Trucks as long as freighters went roaring by, delivering a wind like a blow of a fist. These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pas, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to Califo rnia without seeing a single thing.
At intervals there are places of rest and recreation, food, fuel and oil, postcards, steam-table food, picnic tables, garbage cans all fresh and newly painted, rest rooms and lavatories so spotless, so incensed with deodorants and with detergents that it takes time to get your sense of smell back....
It is life at a peak of some kind of civilization. The restaurant accommodations, great scallops of counters with simulated leather stools, are as spotless as and not unlike the lavatories. Everything that can be captured and held down is sealed in clear plastic. The food is oven-fresh, spotless and tasteless; untouched by human hands. I remembered with an ache certain dishes in France and Italy touched by innumerable human hands.
These centers for rest, food and replenishment are kept beautiful with lawns and flowers. At the front, nearest the highway, are parking places for passenger automobiles together with regiments of gasoline pumps. At the rear the trucks draw up, and there they have their services -- the huge overland caravans. Being technically a truck, Rocinante [i.e., Steinbeck's camper] took her place in the rear, and I soon made acquaintance with the truckers. They are a breed set apart from the life around them, the long-distance truckers. In some town or city somewhere their wives and children live while the husbands traverse the nation carrying every kind of food and product and machine. They are clannish and they stick together, speaking a specialized language. And although I was a small craft among monsters of transportation they were kind to me and helpful.
I learned that in the truck parks there are showers and soap and towels -- that I cou ld park and sleep at night if I wished. The men had little commerce with local people, but being avid radio listeners they could report news and politics from all parts of the nation. The food and fuel centers on the parkways or thruways are leased by the various states, but on other highways private enterprise has truckers' stations that offer discounts on fuel, beds, baths and places to sit and shoot the breeze. But being a specialized group, leading special lives, associating only with their own kind, they would have made it possible for me to cross the country without talking to a local town-bound man. For the truckers cruise over the surface of the nation without being a part of it. Of course in the towns where their families live they have whatever roots are possible -- clubs, dances, love affairs and murders.
I liked the truckers very much, as I always like specialists. By listening to them talk I accumulated a vocabulary of the road, of tires and springs, of overweight. The truckers over long distances have stations along their routes where they know the service men and the waitresses behind the counters, and where occasionally they meet their opposite numbers in other trucks. The great get-together symbol is the cup of coffee....
Quite often I sat with these men and listened to their talk and now and then I asked questions. I soon learned not to expect knowledge of the country they passed through. Except for the truck stops, they had no contact with it. It was driven home to me how like sailors they were. I remember when I first went to sea being astonished that the men who sailed over the world and touched the ports to the strange and exotic had little contact with that world. Some of the truckers on long hauls traveled in pairs and took their turns. The one off duty slept or read paperbacks. But on the roads their interests were engines, and weather, and maintaining the speed that makes the predictable schedule possible. Some of them were on regular runs back and forth while others moved over single operations. It is a whole pattern of life, little known to the settled people along the routes of the great trucks.
Copyright © 1999 by Richard Rhodes