Changes in Pager's Lifetime

I've been remiss about posting birthday celebrations. Pager's 95th birthday was on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. We celebrated at his house the day before, which was Labor Day.

I've been thinking about the changes that Pager has seen in his lifetime. (Pager is fond of noting that Europeans discovered this part of the world only 400 years ago, and he's been around for almost a quarter of that time.) The photo below is four years old (11/6/05) but it shows Pager listening to Laura's iPod Nano. Now there's some change!

Modern electronics like the iPod Nano and computers (including blogs) would not be possible without quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and relativity were the two major scientific developments of the 20th century. Both got started in the decade just before Pager was born, with major papers in both areas by Einstein in 1905.

What else was going on in the world when Pager was born on September 8, 1914? The Germans had just invaded Belgium and France the month before, starting World War I. But that didn't directly affect Pager. Let's consider how the world looked to Pager.

When Pager was a boy, the most advanced method of transportation available to him at home on the farm was a horse & buggy. If he rode in the buggy to Cambridge village, two miles away, he could board a steam train. No cars or tractors. Certainly no commercial airplanes. No radio or TV, and certainly no computers. No electricity! Artificial light was by candle or lantern. Pager's parents did have a telephone at the farm. In fact, they had to use the telephone on the day he was born. It was a difficult birth, and he might not have made it into the world if the telephone had not been available to call a doctor. Of course, the telephone technology was different from today. Not many people today remember the crank telephone.

Here are a few milestones in communications and transportation in the years before Pager was born:

- steam engines (first commercial steam railroad 1830)
- telegraph (1844)
- telephone (1876)
- internal combustion engines (1876)
- radio (1902)
- propeller airplanes (Wright Brothers—1903)
- automobiles (first widely available car—Model T—1908)

Other major developments, that we now take for granted, did not come until later—in the 1930s. The first major television broadcast was the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Jet airplanes were first flown by the Germans in 1939. In 1936 the British mathematician Alan Turing proposed his concept of universal computation, the so-called Turing machine, which eventually led to the computer that we know today.

The first car at the Putnam farm, a Model T, came in 1921, when Pager was 6 or 7. Electricity did not come to the farm until 1941, when Pager was 26 or 27. The first tractor on the farm was in 1943—a "Doodle Bug," really an old Model A truck that had been modified for field work. Until that time, all field work was done with horses. Pager was the one who introduced tractors to the farm. No doubt his father couldn't understand why horses weren't perfectly adequate.

If I make a list of the biggest changes that Pager has seen, I come up with the following: cars; tractors; electricity; modern telephone; radio; TV; computers; the Internet; jet airplanes; putting a man on the Moon in 1969; space probes to all of the planets; 15 million dead in World War I—at the time the worst war the world had ever seen, but soon to be eclipsed by 50 million dead in World War II; 25-50 million dead in the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919; the right to vote for women in 1920; the atomic bomb; nuclear energy; refrigeration; antibiotics; biotechnology; the rise of the carbon-based economy (soon to fall?); the rise and fall of communism (another 25-50 million dead).

Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments on what you think are the biggest changes that Pager has seen in his lifetime.

UPDATE 11/27/09: Here's something I forgot to mention—Vermont is much more wooded now than it was when Pager was born. In 1910, Vermont was 70% cropland and pastureland. In 2002 it was only 11% cropland and pastureland, with most of the rest being woods (some is cities, villages and roads). Source: Census of Agriculture. I wrote about this for work here and here (first comment).