Looking Back At the Future

My paternal grandfather, Granddaddy Paul, worked as a leading-man model maker and machinist at the David Taylor Model Basin, a naval facility on the Maryland side of the Potomac River in Carderock.  You can see the Model Basin from the American Legion Bridge on the Capital Beltway.

 

The Model Basin is so named because it houses a gigantic, .6-mile-long pool of water with a carriage that runs above it to tow model ships through the water to test their waterborne characteristics.  The carriage can tow models at very precise speeds up to 50 knots.  In addition, the basin can generate waves of exacting height and modulation.  Considering the Model Basin was built in 1938, the technology is amazing, though with today’s computer-aided design systems the idea of testing hull designs by building wooden models and towing them through water seems a bit anachronistic. But the Model Basin is still operating and admirably serving the U.S. Navy.  It is on the National Register of Historic Places.

 

When my dad finished his engineering degree at George Washington University he went to work at the Model Basin as an electrical engineer.  My mom worked there for several years to help pay for college for my brother and me, and a couple of my cousins worked there as well.

In the summer the Model Basin hosted a picnic for employees and their families.  Besides offering the usual hot dogs and ice cream, the picnic was a chance to showcase the work that went on there.  One year, when I was maybe eight years old, we saw a demonstration of a depth charge exploding in a testing pond.  It blew a raft and a dummy high into the air and made an incredible booming, whooshing sound.  There was also a guy flying around using a jetpack—that really blew me away.  This was in the early-to-mid 1960s. 

 

I remember watching The Jetsons on TV as a kid.  The family had a talking robot maid.  When George, the father, woke up in the morning, the bed catapulted him onto a conveyor belt that took him through an automated shower and a dressing room that automatically dressed him.  His wife pushed a button in the kitchen and breakfast was dispensed onto the table.  Then George drove his flying car to the office in a Space Needle-type building.  There were other futuristic amenities, including videophones.

 

The 1960s was a very exciting time.  The United States was the undisputed leader in technology.  Fantastic new consumer products (that seem quaint today) were being introduced all the time—color television, touchtone phones, portable radios, stereo record players.  The space program, which was booming forward in its push to go to the moon by decade’s end, was driving technological advances that would lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in miniaturization, computers and other areas.   

It was fun to speculate about what the utopian future world would be like.  And it’s fun to look back and see just how wrong we were.

Jetpacks and flying cars?  I wish.  If the jetpack industry had advanced like the PC industry, we would all have one and they would cost about $20.  I don’t think anyone from the 1960s thought that in the 2000s we’d still be sitting in crushing earthbound commuter traffic.

 

Robot maids?  Maybe someday.  So far the closest we’ve gotten are those robotic disc-shaped vacuum cleaners.  Maybe if our immigration and minimum wage laws were different the economics of robot maids would be better.

But two particular technologies that weren’t popularly anticipated in the 1960s totally overshadow the conveniences that were portrayed on TV and places like Disneyworld’s Tomorrowland: the Internet and mobile phones.

What a game-changing, paradigm-shifting advent the Internet has become.  Sometimes we need to take a step back to get a perspective on just how amazing it is.  Did anyone in the 1960s foresee having just about all of humanity’s collective knowledge (or at least information, factual or not) instantly accessible?  And, with mobile phones (so inadequately named) to have in your pocket or purse access to that information wherever you are?  Being able to get directions from anywhere to anywhere, to find a Starbuck’s or a bank or a McDonald’s, to watch movies or make a charitable contribution or any of the millions of other activities we routinely do from our phones, it’s really kind of a miracle. 

And while I would love to strap on my jetpack and take off, I think having the Internet and mobile access is even better.

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