Wood stoves heated their homes. There were no paved roads. Plastic was unknown. I spent summers on my uncle's horse-operated farm, which might have been transported in a time machine from the 1800s. Today, in contrast, I sit at a video terminal filled with news gathered by a roof dish from a fixed-orbit satellite hovering 22,300 miles over the equator.
Electronic boxes print perfect columns of type, and lasers separate colors in photos.
It was sent by telephone to Virginia, then by phone to Texas, then bounced off a satellite to a California base station, then rebroadcast in the main satellite transmission received by our roof dish. News Editor Vic Burkhammer occasionally griped that a lightning storm in Dallas prevented him from getting news from 50 feet down the hall. But usually it was faster to transmit 100,000 miles than to walk 50 feet. We're so busy watching elections, local wars, lawsuits, abortion battles, scandals, terrorist raids, dope raids and the rest of the daily dither that we hardly notice technological breakthroughs. For example, you probably missed the report last month that a Texas physicist achieved superconductivity at merely 164 degrees below zero, the warmest yet.