500 Pounds of Antiques in a 4 Ounce Cell Phone
Last week we received new company phones here at Black Market Antiques. My new phone was not much more technologically advanced than my personal phone, which is a couple of years old, but my new company phone is equipped with a GPS navigational system. As I was playing around with the GPS I couldn’t help but thinking that it was so much nicer than having a map or an atlas. It was then I realized that I had completely taken technology for granted.
I was reminded of a conversation I had with my Grandfather after I got my first cell phone more than a decade ago. My Grandfather – who is now in his mid-90′s – told me that he could remember the first phone to be installed in his rural community. A family that lived next door (1/2 mile away in rural Pennsylvania at the time) got the first phone. He remembered the exact year some seventy years later, yet I can’t remember the date from his story ten years ago. He said that everyone in the area already thought of the family as being rich, but when the family got a telephone they suddenly became obscenely rich in everyone’s eyes. That family’s house still stands today and it’s ~1200 square feet of space seem tiny by today’s standards.
My new phone that weighs four ounces has more functions than 500 pounds worth of items that were either not invented or available to my Grandfather as a child. It’s easy to forget that less than a hundred years ago there was no television, radios were bulky and often enormous, telephones were scarce in most of the country, the only medium for playing music was hand-cranked victrolas, if you wanted to look up a location in another county it required a thick heavy atlas…etc. Even the seemingly simple function of having a calculator on my cell phone is a marvel when considering the type of intricate and complex calculating machines available a hundred years ago, many of which weighed 25 pounds or more themselves.
I am in my early thirties and was born before video games, CD’s, VCR’s, satellite television, personal computers and GPS…. The world has changed so much since I was a child, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for my Grandfather to see such advances in technology, and even harder to imagine what kind of technology will be available sixty years from now when I’m his age.
