PEA RIDGE — A few days ago I got to thinking about some inventions that have come about during my lifetime.
Probably very few things can do more to make a man feel his age than to think about things that are common now but didn’t exist when he was young. Lots of things have been invented over the past 70 years, and I’m not going to try to name a long list. I know I could only come up with a tiny fraction of the total.
Several years ago I heard a story that one of the bishops of the church in the 1880s had published a paper in which he stated that probably nearly everything has now been invented that can be invented, so the future will mainly seea spreading of older inventions into wider uses. At the time, the good church man’s statement may have seemed like a reasonable and sensible statement.
But, of course, looking back on it from the perspective of the 20th century and theearly 21st century, it now seems enormously shortsighted. In the 1880s, the steam locomotive was coming into its glory, changing travel and commerce, tying together distant places, lacing together the nation with a network of steel rails. It was great, but just think of all the new inventions and changes that have come about since that time.
The steam locomotive was still in its heyday when I was growing up. I spent many a Saturday sitting on the front fenders of our car, parked along First Street in Rogers, watching the steam engines switching rail cars, ringing the bell from time to time, and sounding the great steam whistle that supplied that haunting, never-to-beforgotten sound whichmarked the era of steampowered railroading. But, about the time that I was becoming an adult, the growly diesel electric locomotives were taking over as the dominant source of railroad power, and the exciting, nearly-alive, great old steamers were fading away, sometimes to be scrapped, sometimes to be abandoned in old forgotten shops, sometimes to be set out in public parks as quaint, old, rusting hulks from the past. I am often able to embrace new inventions and to appreciate the advances they bring, but I still have trouble appreciating the chains of growly diesel-electric engines that replaced my grand old “chugging, huffing” steamers. Railroading without steam is missing the romance and grandeur that it had in the days of the old steam choo-choos.
When my first granddaughter was a small girl, she loved to watch her video tapes, especially thestory of Snow White. She would dance and sing as the good fairies sang, and she knew the story so well that she could recite the words even before they sounded in the speakers.
Those were VHS tapes. I know that she totally wore out at least one tape player, and put many an hour on others. One day, I happened to mention to her that when I was her age we had no TVs at all. Nobody had a TV. I tell the truth, she asked me, “But how did you play your tapes, Papa?!”
Well, I guess I didn’t!
Video tapes came about long after I had passed into adulthood. I noticed a few days ago that I have a supply of fresh, new, blank VHS tape cartridges, all ready to record something.
It seems like only a year or so ago that those tapes were state-of-the-art things for recording shows and songs and lectures and sermons; anything you wanted to preserve for listening.
It seems like just the other day CDs were becoming all the rage for recording.
Then it was DVDs. Then came Blu-Ray technology.
Who knows what’s next?
I didn’t know about it at the time, but TVs and computers were being invented when I was a boy. The early TVs sold to the public had 5-inch screens, and a heavy cabinet full of vacuum tubes. The technology had advanced when we finally bought a TV in 1953. Our TV had a 12-inch screen.
We had a 50-foot antenna tower on the hill, with a rotor to aim the antenna to the station, and a set-top control box to adjust the antenna. With all that great equipment, we could bring in a snowy picture on threechannels.
Probably the most influential invention during my lifetime has been electronics. Electronics had developed as far as the radio before I was born.
Those were the days of radio cases filled with rowsof brightly glowing vacuum tubes. The finer your radio, the more tubes you had, to test, and to replace. Our hardware stores back then often provided tube testers which bold customers could use to self-diagnose those bad radio tubes. But, a few years ago, the transistor was invented, and those old vacuum tubes have all but disappeared. We are into the days of electronic miniaturization, mini-calculators, smart phones, palm-sized TVs. I wonder if almost everything has been invented now, or if it just goes on and on?
Cars are getting too smart, and too bossy, you know?
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 08/01/2012