Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith
ilmarinen - MODERATOR
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Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
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- Aug 20, 2004
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Last night I was giving a talk to a group, and was telling them about my observations on the changes in the world and progress of science during my life. Someone said, "You should write that down." I thought about that, and decide to put down some of the thoughts here.
I was born in the exact middle of the twentieth century ( January 1950). My grandparents had seen horses give way to cars, planes fly in the air, the first telephones in homes, the development of the vacuum tube, electric lighting becoming common, electric appliances and tools, and radios making communications possible when news papers were the only earlier method. They told me of these changes, and I was amazed to think of a world without those things. ( My grandfather was the inventor of the modern dial phone and several vacuum tubes making radio work better)
As a lad, we had a local black farmer who brought a mule drawn wagon every weekday to the street corner in front of my house, and all the housewives would come out and buy the fresh vegetables needed for that day's meal. We had an ice man who delivered ice, and the service stations ( what they called gas stations back then) sold block ice from big vending machine. Coke was five cents. Many people with full time jobs worked for less than a dollar an hour. Odd jobs were paid about $0.25/Hr. Gas was 35 cents a gallon, sometimes less, and the fellow pumped it for you...as he washed your windows and checked your oil and tires. Gas wars between stations on opposite corners would take gas down to 15 cent a gallon.
Kids often walked to school, which was in your neighborhood, and we called teaches Sir and Ma'am. We often wore ties to school...yes, even bow ties. All girls wore dresses or long skirts. Pants were not allowed on girls. If any more than the top of the knee showed, a girl would be sent home to change, as she was indecent. A teacher who became pregnant ( married, of course) would be put on leave, as children could no be exposed to pregnancy...it might make them ask questions...even high school students. A teacher who was not married and became pregnant was fired on the spot.....no argument allowed.
In my youth, I saw jet planes replace propellers, telephones in almost every house, refrigerators replace ice boxes, TVs replace radios, color replace B&W TV, 500 pound monsters TVs become portable units, homes having more than one TV ( Unbelievable!), transistors and semiconductors replace tubes, air conditioning replace fans, and cars becoming a normal possession of most families. In the 1950's, washing machines used to be rolled up to the sink and hooked up to the faucet. Clothes were dried on a line in the back yard. The microwave was almost a magical device in the 1960's. The first ones were HUGE, and cost $500-700.
Cakes switched from being made from scratch and hand beaten to made from boxes of "cake mix" using electric mixers. Pre-made dinners were available in the frozen foods isle. Some guy in California came up with the idea of selling hamburgers at walk up restaurants called McDonalds. People would not invest in such a ridiculous idea...after all anyone could cook a hamburger in their own back yard on the grill for free. Beer was cheaper than Coke. Girls wearing a wedding ring could buy beer and wine at the store without being asked their age...because it was impolite to ask a married woman such a personal question. There was thing called the draft that could send boys to war...and did. Women were not allowed to do many jobs. You could go to war at 18, but couldn't vote or drink until you were 21.
I saw big reel to reel tape players change into hand held 3" reel players, to 4 track, 8 track, cassette, CD, and now digital devices as small as a pack of gum that store 1000 songs..
I saw a hand held electronic machine that would add, subtract, multiply, and divide replace a big desk top mechanical machine that did the same. The thing was called a calculator. It cost over $100. You were not allowed to use it in school, because that was cheating. We all were taught to use slide rules, which were OK to use on math tests. Fingers and toes were regularly used to check our math on.
I saw an amazing thing called a business machine" that had 8000 bits of memory. It changed to 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, 256K, over a Meg, and now terabytes. Adding 8K of memory cost several hundred dollars. People but their own computers with soldering irons. It went from taking an hour to load a program to less than a second. I saw magnetic tape become big floppy discs, small floppy disc, hard discs, postage stamp size data cards, and now thumb drives that hold more data than the entire UCLA computer system did in 1980. Computers fell from $10,000 to $100.
Telephones went from big black desk phones on party lines, to wireless home phones with 100 feet of range, to cellular, and to satellite. My first cellular phone was $4000, they give them away today. A call to Europe as a much as $100, now it is free. We had map books in every car, and we studied map reading in school. Today, we use a GPS that tells us where we are, how fast we are going, and how to get to the nearest Taco Bell.
I saw the sound barrier broken, rockets escape gravity, a satellite "beep" a message to the earth, a dog and a monkey go into space, Shepard shot 100 miles into space, Glenn circle the earth, and Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon. All this happened in the span of ten years. I saw the first space station assembled, and a mars rover that still is traveling around the red planet today.
I saw the devastating power of the atom bomb being harnessed into electric power and ship propulsion. Buck Rogers "ray gun" became a real laser. Diseases that killed and crippled children and presidents alike were prevented with a sugar cube or a single shot. Diseases that killed you were cured with drugs created in a lab. A new disease called AIDS was one of the scariest thing anyone heard of. Cancer was not talked about, and was called the "Big C". Sex was called fornication, or "doing it". Many 16 year old girls had no idea where babies came from. Many 16 year old boys were dying to show them, but failed miserably. Despite locker room bragging, most 18 year old boys and girls were still virgins. At least half of those still were when they got married. Birth control pills were the brand new way to avoid having your first baby nine months after getting married.
I lived in a time when boys shot rifles in the woods inside of the city limits, kids carried knives to school, and people never locked their doors. I knew people with no locks on the doors at all.
I saw hobos who would come to the back door and ask if they could do some work for a meal. They didn't want money, they really wanted the hot food. They also would be insulted if you gave it to them and did not let them do some work for it.
Teachers would just put kids in their car and take them on a field trip, or take them home if someone missed his bus.
We went to the movies on Saturday for 25 cents, and saw two moves. We had heroes like Superman, Zorro, and Tarzan, We all played pretend games that we were those people, and on almost any day you would hear Tarzan yells throughout the neighborhood. We took bows and arrow as well as knives and spears into the woods to play "Cowboys and Indians". Westerns were the most common TV show and movies. The scariest movie was Dracula or The Mummy. No one was eviscerated and there was no blood. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was more of a comedy than a Horror movie. Dick VanDyke and Mary Tyler more slept in separate bets on TV. No one quite knew where little Richie came from. The network tried to cancel 'I Love Lucy" when she became pregnant.
99% of homes had a mom and a dad. Dad worked and mom stayed home with the kids. We said grace at dinner, and everyone ate at the same table.....every meal. There was no such thing as telling your parent to F### off ( and living to tell about it). We often left the house at 8AM on Saturday morning and often did not came back until 6PM for dinner. I never, ever, heard of a kid shooting someone. We never heard gun shots at night. We thought life was fun and exciting. Kids were happy, not depressed. Suicide was almost unheard of since the crash of '29. Divorce happened, but was rare. Two or three boys went out into the local woods with a pup tent and bedrolls and no one thought they were queer or smoking dope.
I was born in the exact middle of the twentieth century ( January 1950). My grandparents had seen horses give way to cars, planes fly in the air, the first telephones in homes, the development of the vacuum tube, electric lighting becoming common, electric appliances and tools, and radios making communications possible when news papers were the only earlier method. They told me of these changes, and I was amazed to think of a world without those things. ( My grandfather was the inventor of the modern dial phone and several vacuum tubes making radio work better)
As a lad, we had a local black farmer who brought a mule drawn wagon every weekday to the street corner in front of my house, and all the housewives would come out and buy the fresh vegetables needed for that day's meal. We had an ice man who delivered ice, and the service stations ( what they called gas stations back then) sold block ice from big vending machine. Coke was five cents. Many people with full time jobs worked for less than a dollar an hour. Odd jobs were paid about $0.25/Hr. Gas was 35 cents a gallon, sometimes less, and the fellow pumped it for you...as he washed your windows and checked your oil and tires. Gas wars between stations on opposite corners would take gas down to 15 cent a gallon.
Kids often walked to school, which was in your neighborhood, and we called teaches Sir and Ma'am. We often wore ties to school...yes, even bow ties. All girls wore dresses or long skirts. Pants were not allowed on girls. If any more than the top of the knee showed, a girl would be sent home to change, as she was indecent. A teacher who became pregnant ( married, of course) would be put on leave, as children could no be exposed to pregnancy...it might make them ask questions...even high school students. A teacher who was not married and became pregnant was fired on the spot.....no argument allowed.
In my youth, I saw jet planes replace propellers, telephones in almost every house, refrigerators replace ice boxes, TVs replace radios, color replace B&W TV, 500 pound monsters TVs become portable units, homes having more than one TV ( Unbelievable!), transistors and semiconductors replace tubes, air conditioning replace fans, and cars becoming a normal possession of most families. In the 1950's, washing machines used to be rolled up to the sink and hooked up to the faucet. Clothes were dried on a line in the back yard. The microwave was almost a magical device in the 1960's. The first ones were HUGE, and cost $500-700.
Cakes switched from being made from scratch and hand beaten to made from boxes of "cake mix" using electric mixers. Pre-made dinners were available in the frozen foods isle. Some guy in California came up with the idea of selling hamburgers at walk up restaurants called McDonalds. People would not invest in such a ridiculous idea...after all anyone could cook a hamburger in their own back yard on the grill for free. Beer was cheaper than Coke. Girls wearing a wedding ring could buy beer and wine at the store without being asked their age...because it was impolite to ask a married woman such a personal question. There was thing called the draft that could send boys to war...and did. Women were not allowed to do many jobs. You could go to war at 18, but couldn't vote or drink until you were 21.
I saw big reel to reel tape players change into hand held 3" reel players, to 4 track, 8 track, cassette, CD, and now digital devices as small as a pack of gum that store 1000 songs..
I saw a hand held electronic machine that would add, subtract, multiply, and divide replace a big desk top mechanical machine that did the same. The thing was called a calculator. It cost over $100. You were not allowed to use it in school, because that was cheating. We all were taught to use slide rules, which were OK to use on math tests. Fingers and toes were regularly used to check our math on.
I saw an amazing thing called a business machine" that had 8000 bits of memory. It changed to 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, 256K, over a Meg, and now terabytes. Adding 8K of memory cost several hundred dollars. People but their own computers with soldering irons. It went from taking an hour to load a program to less than a second. I saw magnetic tape become big floppy discs, small floppy disc, hard discs, postage stamp size data cards, and now thumb drives that hold more data than the entire UCLA computer system did in 1980. Computers fell from $10,000 to $100.
Telephones went from big black desk phones on party lines, to wireless home phones with 100 feet of range, to cellular, and to satellite. My first cellular phone was $4000, they give them away today. A call to Europe as a much as $100, now it is free. We had map books in every car, and we studied map reading in school. Today, we use a GPS that tells us where we are, how fast we are going, and how to get to the nearest Taco Bell.
I saw the sound barrier broken, rockets escape gravity, a satellite "beep" a message to the earth, a dog and a monkey go into space, Shepard shot 100 miles into space, Glenn circle the earth, and Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon. All this happened in the span of ten years. I saw the first space station assembled, and a mars rover that still is traveling around the red planet today.
I saw the devastating power of the atom bomb being harnessed into electric power and ship propulsion. Buck Rogers "ray gun" became a real laser. Diseases that killed and crippled children and presidents alike were prevented with a sugar cube or a single shot. Diseases that killed you were cured with drugs created in a lab. A new disease called AIDS was one of the scariest thing anyone heard of. Cancer was not talked about, and was called the "Big C". Sex was called fornication, or "doing it". Many 16 year old girls had no idea where babies came from. Many 16 year old boys were dying to show them, but failed miserably. Despite locker room bragging, most 18 year old boys and girls were still virgins. At least half of those still were when they got married. Birth control pills were the brand new way to avoid having your first baby nine months after getting married.
I lived in a time when boys shot rifles in the woods inside of the city limits, kids carried knives to school, and people never locked their doors. I knew people with no locks on the doors at all.
I saw hobos who would come to the back door and ask if they could do some work for a meal. They didn't want money, they really wanted the hot food. They also would be insulted if you gave it to them and did not let them do some work for it.
Teachers would just put kids in their car and take them on a field trip, or take them home if someone missed his bus.
We went to the movies on Saturday for 25 cents, and saw two moves. We had heroes like Superman, Zorro, and Tarzan, We all played pretend games that we were those people, and on almost any day you would hear Tarzan yells throughout the neighborhood. We took bows and arrow as well as knives and spears into the woods to play "Cowboys and Indians". Westerns were the most common TV show and movies. The scariest movie was Dracula or The Mummy. No one was eviscerated and there was no blood. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was more of a comedy than a Horror movie. Dick VanDyke and Mary Tyler more slept in separate bets on TV. No one quite knew where little Richie came from. The network tried to cancel 'I Love Lucy" when she became pregnant.
99% of homes had a mom and a dad. Dad worked and mom stayed home with the kids. We said grace at dinner, and everyone ate at the same table.....every meal. There was no such thing as telling your parent to F### off ( and living to tell about it). We often left the house at 8AM on Saturday morning and often did not came back until 6PM for dinner. I never, ever, heard of a kid shooting someone. We never heard gun shots at night. We thought life was fun and exciting. Kids were happy, not depressed. Suicide was almost unheard of since the crash of '29. Divorce happened, but was rare. Two or three boys went out into the local woods with a pup tent and bedrolls and no one thought they were queer or smoking dope.
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