On wooden ships and foxhole radios

Foxhole radio - c. 1942

We commemorated the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Lake Erie a few weeks ago. On September 10, 1813, a rag-tag group of American sailors led by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry beat the British fleet at Put-in-Bay, Ohio. This decisive battle was a major factor in resolving the War of 1812. Perry is memorialized in his home state of Rhode Island and at Presque Island, Pennsylvania, where six of his nine-ship fleet were built by hand, from their keels up.

In a seemingly unrelated event, National Public Radio recently aired an appreciative retrospective about AM radio. Listeners called in and recounted tales of making crystal radios from scratch. Veterans of World War II remembered building “foxhole radios” which used a razor blade and pencil as a detector to pull music and comedy skits from the ether, cheering an otherwise grim battlefield.

These disparate observations illustrate an important point. For nearly all of humankind’s existence, we lived in close proximity to our various technologies. You could either weave cloth from wool yourself or knew someone who could. And at the very least, you were certainly capable of understanding how it was done. Nearly anyone could become a blacksmith or learn to grow and reap a crop of wheat. Or build a wooden ship, or a radio.

It is only in the past fifty years or so, the briefest tick of human existence, that our technologies have become so complex, so remote.

Former backyard mechanics joke that one now needs a double degree in mechanical and computer engineering to build a car. But the joke is true. Fifty years ago, we could adjust the point gap and timing, change the carburetor jets, and really understand what was happening. Today, we look at our shiny new iPhone and haven’t a clue that it uses quantum tunneling effects to store our silly cat video, a concept that bedeviled Albert Einstein himself (quantum tunneling, that is, not the cat videos, but one wonders what he would have thought of them).

This evolution of complexity and technological remoteness will accelerate, and it will do so exponentially. Our children and their children will live in a world far removed from crystal radios and backyard brake jobs. This isn’t a bad thing. Technology has given us wonderful advances leading to notably longer human life spans.

But, yet, a wedge is being driven into our humanity, separating us from the world that nurtures us. It’s not that we shouldn’t celebrate the advent of autonomous (driver-less) cars and nano-engineered robots, but we need to retain our connectedness to Mother Earth. It is important to know how to grow a tomato and how to make your own sauce. While enjoying the constant chatter of Facebook, you must write an actual letter, in your own hand, to express your love to a distant elderly relative.

So let’s revel in this wild ride we're all on together, but don’t forget to take that quiet walk in the woods with the iPhone shut off. The silly cat video can wait a bit.