When I was a very small child it seemed a thing of real wonder to me that the world into which my Nana was born was one which had NO aeroplanes flying in the sky.
By the time I was born there were lots – though I don’t think we knew anybody who had ever flown in one, except perhaps during the War. Most foreign travel, even (especially) intercontinental, was still by sea.
My mother was the first in the family to fly, all the way to Brussels when I was in my first year as an undergraduate. The friend who was to be her host, the wife of a Canadian Air Force pilot based in Germany, came over to escort her on the outward flight; my father refused, just refused, even to contemplate the idea of setting foot outside the UK after his Far East experience during WWII (it was the funny food he did not trust).
My mother had been longing to get to France, ever since my arrival had frustrated her planned trip ‘with General Eisenhower’, but de Gaulle was not then allowing NATO forces, even off duty, to cross the border, so she had to settle for a tour of Belgium & Luxembourg (she could not face Germany).
My main interest in her traveller’s tale was in how she had coped with lying with her feet in the air during take off on the return trip. I had spent part of my gap year as an au pair in Brussels: the airport was then very close to the city & I had watched the planes taking off seemingly almost vertically. I was disappointed when she said she hadn’t noticed, it had not felt like that at all.
***
My Nana’s world without planes seems no less implausible to me now than a world without electronic calculators. I was reminded of this by an article about Casio, illustrated with a picture of the models produced by the firm over the years .
***
Except for one short ‘practical’ class we studied applied (economic & social) statistics all the way through to degree finals with the aid only of log tables or slide rule, + Cambridge Elementary Statistical Tables for values of the Normal distribution, r, χ2, F & N!When I started ‘real’ work there were a couple of venerable electro-mechanical machines available between 4 of us. They had banks of keys for each digit & you had to be careful to align the cylinders correctly for division (by repeated subtraction). To this day I have difficulty explaining to someone how to use a calculator to get a % - I just mentally multiply by 100 & get flummoxed by % keys.
One of the machines was well worn & temperamental. It had a kind of key on the front which turned the upper, free, cylinder when it needed to shift to the left to continue the repeated subtraction. It tended to slip, ruining everything, but if you held it gently you could feel when it really ought to turn, let it go, then hold it steady till the next flip.
Then I was seconded to work on a UN funded project. It was agreed that something better was needed, the budget was there. I advised that the latest FACIT electro-mechanical model with 4 registers was better value for money than the available electronic models.
If I remember correctly (& I think I do) it cost about £750 in 1960’s money. To get some idea of what that would be today, an average new graduate salary would then have been not much more than £1,000; according to The Times Good University Guide the average starting salary for today’s graduate of my alma mater is over £25,000.
I spent whole days (& not a few nights) pounding the keys of that machine. In a wooden building, the noise was quite something. On a few occasions visitors were brought in to marvel at the speed with which my fingers flew. The human computer.
Today I am very happy with my CASIO Fx-200P which must be at least 25 years old, cost about £20 & has, so I am assured, more power than the NASA computers which put a man on the moon. It is incredibly economical on the batteries & meets most of my needs. I can use it without having to think about it.
I find my bright blue TEXET very handy too (99p with a free ballpoint pen). Though very basic, it has a √ key.
***
I think an even bigger revolution in my calculating life came before I ever had an electronic desk top calculator - remote access to a computer, via an IBM teletype machine which printed out its results at a stately 10 cps. That too was a very noisy machine.
The link was effected by dialling up the computer’s own telephone line & then jamming the old fashioned hand set into a modem which looked like a shoe box. Soon International Dialling arrived & we could connect via satellite with a computer in Arizona. We were nervous about what might happen if any MP ever heard that British Government data was being processed in America.
The effect of technology on our sense of time has been much studied & analysed.
The 20th century electronic girdle round the earth that is the internet & the World Wide Web has had similarly destabilising influence for future historians to analyse.
One thing I do not think has happened however is that we make quicker decisions. Instead we use the time, or the power, to try to improve decisions, when they come, by looking at ever more alternative scenarios with an ever increasing number of variables & an ever increasing number of people to be consulted in the process.
Are the decisions, in the end, any better? Pass. (Weather forecasts, at least, are much improved).
The ability of electronic communications to magnify the clamour can, in selected instances, just increase the pressure to do something, SOON, without giving time to think about or analyse the problem. Multiplying the distance that news can travel compresses the time available for response.
How about moving ourselves around?
We can fly at speeds unimaginable to previous generations, but the intriguing suggestion is that we keep the total time spent travelling the same as it was when we had only our own locomotion to propel us.
If this is true, I wonder if our subliminal calculation includes the waiting in airports ‘for security’ as travel time?
Links
