Steve Hansen: Tracking the fast pace of technology

There’s no doubt that the most amazing events during my lifetime have been in the areas of electronic technology.

At the mid-20th century, most of us couldn’t imagine the communication devices that people take for granted today. Case in point: One of the most popular newspaper comic strips of the 1930s through the ’70s was about a fictional detective named “Dick Tracy.” Its creator, Chester Gould, had insights that were incomprehensible to his generation. His characters had such things as “two-way wrist radios and TVs.” They were about the size of today’s Apple Watch.

I remember discussing these ideas with my dad. We both agreed that color television, a relatively new invention at that time, could never be made that small. I wrote to Mr. Gould, who lived in Chicago at the time, and discussed the impossibility of devices worn by his heroic characters. He thought enough of me to write back with the same pen and ink used for his drawings and expressed the view that his imaginary creations could well be in our future.

Where is his letter today? Of course, buried somewhere in a Maryland landfill, thanks to my overzealous mother who loved to clean house and throw things away that she personally found useless.

But I digress. Other things considered science fiction back then were personal computers, DVDs, global positioning devices, cheap cell phones, and of course, the Internet.

The idea that a large room full of vacuum tubes, requiring its own power plant during the 1940s, could only do a tiny fraction of computations that hand-held devices do today — well, need I say more?

The Internet is another amazing invention, which has revolutionized communication and distribution of information. I remember in high school, cranking out term papers on a Remington portable manual typewriter, using only information from encyclopedias or other limited data gathered from the local library. Never did I dream that someday, information rivaling the resources of the Library of Congress would be available on my PC or smartphone.

So how did technology leap light years ahead in such a short period of time? Most likely, it was simply derived from several very intelligent people building on one invention and making new discoveries which led to another. But a man named Lt. Col. Phillip J. Corso had quite a different take on the subject.

Corso was a career Army officer whose second to last assignment before retirement in 1963 was chief of the “Foreign Technology Desk” at the Pentagon. According to the colonel, “foreign technology” was a code term used for discoveries of hi-tech components found in crashed UFOs during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He claimed in his book “The Day After Roswell,” published in 1997, that under his direction, the FTD office covertly sent these discoveries to Bell Laboratories, among other defense contractors, for further investigation and development — a process otherwise known as “reverse engineering.”

Because of this action, Corso stated that particle beam devices, fiber optics, lasers, integrated circuit chips and Kevlar material all became realities for earthlings.

Read more @ http://www.lodinews.com/opinion/article_8710caf4-b96c-11e5-ba81-9fa825769834.html


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~