> Perhaps our society has been wealthy for too many generations. Few
> young people seem think about what they want to accomplish in life.
> Everything they could want is there - or so it might appear.
And too many distractions. John Taylor Gatti, NYC teacher of the year
a few times was quick to say the main thing he did is set expectations
and then get out of the way. I like the "shoot your television" concept,
but haven't done so with mine.
> Oh, well. Maybe they are right, and the era of nuts-and-bolts
> engineering and physical science are mostly over. Sort of like the era
> of the great classical symphony composers.
On the latter, look up John Rutter, he started with reinvigorating old
Christmas carols and moved on to choral and instrumental works. Most of
his music sounds like it's from the 18th or 19th century, but there's an
interesting modern accent.
As for the former, I wrote the following a while back. While it ran
in the NH Mensa newsletter, I was never happy with it and haven't
put it on the web yet. Too many omissions, too many sentences that
need their own paragraph, but it really needs to be short and great,
not short and good enough or too long to be memorable. I'll fix it someday.
No More Edisons?
-by Ric Werme
One of my childhood heroes was Thomas Edison. No, I'm not old enough to know
him - but his eldest daughter gave me my first book about him. "Aunt Marion"
lived next door to my grandparents was one of my grandmother's closest
friends. That book was a biography written for children and gave an
appreciation of his entire remarkable life. That was some fifty years ago,
and even then it would have been nigh on impossible for another child to
replicate Edison's childhood. Today, aspects would be considered child
neglect or result in other adults facing criminal charges.
In 1859, when Edison was 12, he convinced his mother to let him sell
newspapers on a train that ran between Port Huron and Detroit, 60 miles away.
The time in Detroit was frequently spent reading at the library or buying
items for his chemistry hobby. Apparently there were no restrictions on what
he could buy - just consequences when a stick of phosphorous set fire to the
baggage car when its bottle was jarred loose by bad tracks.
Edison never became an engineer or scientist, he remained an experimenter
and inventor and several of today's products are still closely related to
his original designs.
Suppose someone with Edison's promise were born in 1997,
150 years after the original. How might he turn out? Today's
United States is so vastly different it's hard to tell. Edison
was a "late talking child," not talking until age four. Today, that
is a red flag for autism, though I'm certain Edison's mother would
have found Thomas Sowell's book on the subject and realize that
description is a better fit.
The new Tom would never become a newsboy on the Port Huron train, in part
because it and most other passenger trains no longer run, in part because
neither parent nor train operator would allow it. Nor would he have learned
Morse code or the telegraph business. Instead, I think he would carve an
interesting niche out of the World Wide Web. I've heard stories of motivated
teens setting up commercial web sites, and have no doubt a new Tom would
readily get the little permission and parental support needed to get a
business running. What to sell? Probably not chemicals! Today's EPA,
Consumer Product Safety Commission, Homeland Security, and several other
federal, state, and local agencies and other distractions have virtually
destroyed the home chemistry hobby. They've even created huge obstacles to
legitimate R&D. Perhaps in Russia or India a new Edison could grow up with
chemistry.
New Tom would embrace electronics and could well build his web business
around clever gadgets, peripherals, etc. and reach far more customers
than he ever could on a train. Edison was a master at finding
new products that would create new markets, even if he had to create
the infrastructure to support it. The incandescent light and electricity
production is his the best example. The phonograph and the recording
industry has parallels with today's iPods and music downloading.
As new Tom's business grows, it would give him the capital to look for new
product niches and set about filling them. Genetic engineering or
nanotechnology could be the stage big enough to address the myriad ideas, and
is fresh enough so that empirical design and experimentation that Edison
relied upon might apply to new Tom's work. Science is the process of
understanding how the universe works and developing tools to interact with it.
Engineering takes those tools and creates new systems not previously possible.
Invention envisions new systems not previously known. What might the new Tom
create? I don't know, that's his job. What markets might exist to absorb new
products? That's a much easier question! Medical monitoring for the aging
baby boomers is one obvious choice. Clean energy production or post
production cleanup like carbon sequestration is another. Novel ways of
extracting material from depleted ores or waste couples into that.
Some of the best inventions are things that are fairly simple but no one ever
considered them before. That's one reason why most predictions about the
future fail. When predictions center on improvements to existing technology,
the failure can be quite spectacular when new technology comes along that
makes existing products obsolete.
Can there be another Edison? Perhaps, but he'll have a different background.
Few people are as widely read, as experienced, and as insightful as Thomas
Edison was. I've met people who have some of those characteristics and can
infuse employees with the intense allegiance needed to join in the 99%
perspiration work. However, they have never achieved more than a small bit of
Edison's fame and impact. The biggest obstacle may not be personal, but
environmental. Until a new "disruptive technology" like nanotechnology opens
up thousands of avenues for invention, there may not be room enough for a new
Thomas Edison.
_______________________________________________
gnhlug-discuss mailing list
gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org
http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
