Changes Over Time and Technology

As I get older (I guess older than most) I have reflected on changes to many things. I have never been much for history, political and international things. Countries have changed names and I have lost count. Having not traveled much away from the U.S. mainland kept me in the dark about much of the rest of the world.

One thing I have watched change is technology. When I was just starting school (this was in the 1950’s) I would sit in my Dadss office. In the office they had two telephone numbers which were sequential and ended in 3555 and 3556. Our home telephone number was next in line at 3557. My Grandmother and Great Grandmother lived upstairs. When I stayed upstairs with them my best memory was that Nana would have freshly baked apple pies in the pantry. Well, I call it a pantry but I remember it as a laundry room which was always very cold. She used to call the refigerator an ice box, reflecting back to when they had ice delived to cool foods. I did not understand all the ramifacations at the time, but Nana and Gram were what they called DAR. I later found that it stood for Daughters of the American Revolution. One of their relatived had fought in the war. While quite interesting, our family did not know ‘The Rest Of The STory’ until my Cousin got into geaneology when it bacme popular much later on. The Thomas side of the family went back to the Williams side of the family. One member of the Williams Family (oddly anme William Williams) was a signatory to the Declaration of Independance. Wikipedia: “William Williams was an American Founding Father, merchant, a delegate for Connecticut to the Continental Congress in 1776, and a signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence.”. If I had know that growing up, I would have taken a lot more interest in history.

I do remember that our house had a milk door, a small door that could be opened from the outside and bottles of milk could be left there my the milkman. My Grandfater owned a soda company and we could have wooden cases of 24 bottles of soda delivered to the house. My parents had built the house we were living in and just over 70 years later, I looked it up on Zillow and see that it is still in great shape and showing a value of $500,000. Wow!

My Sister and I could walk to school which was more than a couple blocks away. My first best friend lived down the street and we played often. I don’t remember much about what happened after but we were playing in the street and he was shooting with a bow and arrow. I think my Mom called and I turned and ran towards the house just as Tommy let fly the metal-tipped arrow. It hit just next to my right eye and I still have a scar. Centimeters off and I would have lost the eye. Then there was the time I was in the basement while it was being finished, and understand that I had stuck a nail into a live electric outlet. My parents said that I slept the rest of the afternoon. These days parents would have sat their child down and watched them for hours. I guess my parents just felt I should “walk it off” so to speak. There were a few times they traveled overseas and my Sister and I stayed with friends of the family. That was always exciting.

When we moved to Princeton, I noticed that the telephone service was different. We had to ask the Operator for a number when in our last house we had direct dialing. I remember a few stories about Princeton as we had moved there not long aftr Albert Einstein had lived there. It seemed that he was not always cognizant where he was. He stopped a policeman and asked where he lived. He would go into a store to buy things and just leave a handful of money on the counter. When asked, the store owner said he didn’t really miond as sometimes Einestein left too little and sometimes too much. I doubt this would happen in todays world as he would have been arrested for not paying properly.

I remember a house on the corner near our place and I think it was the first time I ever saw real technology. The owner apparently had built a lawnmower that was (maybe) remote controlled. It went randomly around the yard and may have been restricted by a buried wire at the perimeter of the yard. Today this would be similar to a Roomba vacuum.

About this time, Hawaii was becomming a state but I have no recollection of that. I do know that air travel was quite different than today. People dressed up, could smoke on the plane and to travel overseas was a real adventure. Even telephone service was novel to make long distance calls. You could ask to place an overseas call and the Operator might have to call you back as all sorts of things happened behind the scenes and the cost was very high. Today I can call overseas for less than a penny a minute.

My Uncle Ralph (“Tommy”) was a Ham and was living in Hawaii not long after it became a state. He and another Ham tried and were sucessful communicating across the Pacific Ocean on frequencies normally restricted to local distances by their very nature. The use of atmospherics helped direct the signals. This groun-breaking event took another 50 years or so for someone to break his record. The newspaper at the time stated “If Hawaii is ever linked to the Mainland by radio or television, it may well be because of (this evvent)”. I guess the writer didn’t quite understand that this radio connection was a fluke of nature. Still, it was an exciting event which won bith Hams an award. (https://www.ok2kkw.com/kh6ku/ok1vr58eng.htm). Ralph also did Moonbounce where he transmitted a radio signal at the moon and the idea is other Hams would listen and try to communicate via the bounced radio signal from Earth to the Moon to Earth (EME we call it). This is a somewhat difficult thing to do as the moon is not a perfect reflective service for light or radio waves. For laser reflections, NASA had to place reflective material there for lasers to bounce off. Anyway, Ralph transmitted one time and heard his own transmission back to himself at an off timeframe. You can calculate how long it takes and unless the distance between the moon and earth changes dramatically, it should take the same amount of time. This is about 2.5 seconds. However he heard his signal less than a second later. It turns out he must have been transmitting when the moon was low on the horizon as his signal bounced around in th eionosphere and traveled around the world back to him. People w=may as why Hams try to do things like bounce a radio signal off the moon and the answer is “Because we can!”.

A couple of decades later I would be working for an electrocics company and with test equipment, was able to actually listen in (illegally I guess) on overseas calls without anyone knowing. Satellite links owned by ATT were not encrypted because most people had no idea how to access the satellite feeds. At the same time as a Ham Radio Operator I had a home satellite dish before most people and was able to watch things most people could not. When subscriptions to services became common, I was able to watch most subscribed services for a few hundred dollars a year. Compare that to people today paying a few hundred a month for the same services. I am talking HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, TBS, WGN and the list went on and on.

In the 70’s I had a Ham radio in the car. Our Ham group had a repeater which allowed us to communicate across large distances. I even was able to make telkephone calls from the car or from a hand-held walkie talkie. This was well before cellphones were common. Today we have satellites which allow someone almost anywhere in the world to be in touch. GPS satellites (or even your cellphone) can tell you exactly where you are, oftentimes down to within a few feet.

Many of todays marvels actually started as far out ideas of Science Fiction writers. You know those satellites in the sky ahead? TSome circle the earth but some are what we call geostationary meaning that they are in the same location above the earth. Those in geostationary orbit are in that is called the Clarke Belt. WIk,ipedia: “There is a very interesting region in space around planets called the “Clarke Belt” in honour of Arthur C. Clarke who in 1945 published an article about the use of geostationary orbits for telecommunications. In this belt orbit the geostationary satellites which we use for a large number of practical applications.”. Clarke was a well-known Sci Fi writer.

Other inventions, while not necessarily attributed to Star Trek ceratinly mirror those. Gene Roddenberry asked scientists and NASA experts specific questions and answers to those helped him craft a number of things which made his TV show and movies seem realistic. Laser weapons, warp engines and communications were all incorportaed into the shows. Yes there are some items (like sounds in space) that are used for effect, but items like a cellphone today being able to measure your health, communicate with others over distances is very similar.

Self-driving cars are popular now but a friend of mine actually had one many decades ago in the late 70’s. He had stepped out his car while it was running but the gas pedal was stuck I guess or it was in gear and had just enough power to start on its own but it circled around in the culdesak for a while until a brave bystander jumped in the open door and stopped it.

Around this same time, our Ham Radio Club was active practicing emerency communications. One member aproached Solorex, a company who was making solar panels in the 70’s. He asked for an got a small solar panel, similar to what you see to charge a battery for an electric gate, maybe 8 x 10 inches. He offered to pay for the panel but teh company said they had no idea what to charge for a panel that smnall. I guess their sales were more towards supplying NASA and so on. Our use of the sun to charge or operate one of the hand-held radios gave us extra credit.

Our club operated a repeater which is a receiver and transmitter on a rooftop. That system receives a signal on one frequency and forwards it out on another frequency with more power. The frequencies differ because if it listened and transmitted on the same frequency you would get feedback. Some Hams and I created a box that coupled the receiver and transmitter together and controlled how that happened. The radio signal was received from someone and the audio from the receiver was taken and inserted into the transmitter input. We could also tap into the audio stream and couple it to a telephone. Thus a person on a heanhled could have their audio received, sent into a phone call and the resulting response sent into the transmitter. I was able to demonstrate this ability for Boy Scouts during an event. I had a handheld walkie talkie, transmitted a signal which was picked up by our repeater nearby. I accessed the phone line and dialed a Ham at COMSAT Labs up the road. He patched my audio into the uplink to a repeater (or sorts) which was an Anik satellite over Alaska. My Audio received by the satellit was looped back to the downlink, received and put back into the phone connection, delivered back to our Ham repeater and when I spoke and let go of the microphone, you could hear my voice a few seconds later. Although the satellite signals were not actively being received yet across the upper part of the country as the satellite was still being congifured, it did show that in an emergency a single person with a simple handheld device might be able to make transmission to a whole country ot rhe world. Our reception of the signal back at our location was icing on the cake that our transmission had made it to the satellite.

While that seems quite unusual, it was not all that novel. Almost every astronaut on the Space Shuttles was a licensed Ham Radio Operator. It wa snot unusual for one of them to man a radio during their flights. Hams woudl go to schools and set up a fairly simple transceiver and antenna and communicate with the astronauts was they flew over. School kids could ask questions and speak directly with astronauts in space.

As I ahve been to two Shuttle launches (the 1st and 3rd) and some of the equipment I calibrated was used at NASA, I also hold a some unique bragging right (well, me a perhap a million others). I submitted my name and email address to NASA and it was put into a computer chip which is now on the Mars rover. So I can honestly say that my name is on another planet. Not quite grafitti but neat none the less.

There are more stories and technology that I find interesting but perhaps I’ll save that for another time. As I get older I have more time to reflect.