The World Has Completely Changed Since I was a Child There are a few people who have lived through some of the biggest scientific advancements in history. When I look back at my life, I realize I was one of those lucky people. When I was a child, I never realized what was going on. It was a scientific revolution the likes of which the world had never seen. I was born just before the start of World War II. Life seemed to be pretty much unchanged in the years which led up to the war since the first World War. Yes, weapons had improved, but they were more like those which were already available than not. When the war started that all changed. If we would have realized the United States was working on splitting atoms and the creation of an atom bomb, most people would have brushed this off as fantasy, but it wasn’t. When I look at things from the perspective of today it seems we were too primitive to have accomplished this, yet we did it. The war brought forth jet aircraft, short range rockets and even controlled missiles which could be fired from an aircraft and guided by a television camera and wires. Unfortunately for the allies these weapons were in the hands of the Germans. One of the reasons we won the war was the capability of the United States to out produce any other country in the world, and outproduce we did with 152,000 planes. Along with this we produced 120,000 tanks during the war. When the war ended, we had 6,768 warships. After the war things began to change much more rapidly. Computers were used during the war and once the war ended advancements in computing began to take hold, improving not only the everyday life of people, but also making it easier for companies to produce their products and keep track of their employees and their pay. We all know the first ones filled rooms and this led to what we have today, cell phones with far more power than those huge dinosaur computers of the past. Cars began to get more luxurious and accessories where becoming more available. No longer did we just have to settle for a small engine and a three-speed manual transmission. Automatic transmissions began to become popular a few years after the war ended. As time went by luxury brands of cars began to feature power windows, air conditioning, power brakes, fancy radios and power seats, just to mention a few things. One place where changes were starting to happen even before World War II were the movies. Color movies had existed since 1895 when Georges Melies distributed his movies in both black and white and color, but most people in my day never knew about this. As far as we were concerned the first color film was The Wizard of Oz, which ironically is a bigger hit today than it was then. From there we moved on to 3D and Imax. That was only part of the entertainment revolution. The transistor was perfected and this led to tiny radios which could be carried in a pocket and earphones. Before you knew it all sorts of portable music devices came out, spearheaded by the Sony Walkman. Television became the biggest entertainment instrument after the war and the picture and sound continued to improve. When I was a kid when you got a telephone, it was expensive because phone calls were expensive. Long distance was incredibly expensive, so much so you had to think hard and fast if you could afford to made a long-distance call and you had to really limit the time you were on the phone. Anyone who was alive in those days must be full of wonder at how this has all changed with cell phones and wireless service. The advancements in phone service are incredible. If I would have told someone you could call anywhere in the world for free over your computer, they would have laughed me out of town. Even the rates for the cell phone calls are only a tiny fraction of what calls used to cost compared to income. The minimum wage in the United States in 1949 was 40 cents per hour. A one-minute telephone call from Westchester to Manhattan Beach cost 32 cents a minute and today we would hardly call this long distance. Forget the price to call Europe. If you needed to fly somewhere there were no commercial jet airlines and flights were very expensive, so most people traveled by train or bus. The trip was grueling and took a lot of time. The plane flights were much slower than today. In 1947 it took four days to fly from London to Sydney. Today the trip is about 22 hours. This is due to go down quite a bit in the next few years when planes get a lot faster than the Concord was. We can thank the breakthrough in quietness. The new planes will not cause the loud bang as they break the sound barrier. When we went to the doctor in the 1940s, he would look you over if you had a problem and try and make an educated guess on the cause of your illness. There were no machines other than X-ray machines or fluoroscope machines. You didn’t have all the different types of medical scanners or other devices which we have today. A lot more ailments can be precisely diagnosed thanks to the help of these machines. You also didn’t have robots assisting surgeons during operations. Robotic surgery today has allowed for much more precision in operations. Antibiotics didn’t exist and sulfa based medicines were used and they tasted terrible. My generation was fascinated by science fiction, I think maybe even more than today since we weren’t into space yet and didn’t know what to expect. We were fans of films such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. When the first satellite was launched, sputnik, it scared the heck out of a lot of people because they were picturing atom bombs being launched next. When the Soviets got their man into space we were astounded and when men finally walked on the moon it was unbelievable. Never let anyone tell you we stopped going to the moon because people weren’t interested anymore, that was just a coverup for something else. Everything just seems to be advancing faster every day. To me one of the greatest inventions was GPS. It has changed the lives of people like me who are very bad at directions. Suddenly I became an expert at knowing how to get somewhere. The last forty years or so have been an incredible ride. I have seen things I would never have believed could have been invented and I have watched things which were getting smaller and smaller. Some have become so small as to maybe be too small to handle. I am thinking about some memory cards which are smaller than a fingernail. My world has completely changed.
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