Despite everything, the world has come a very long way in the past fifty years or so, hasn’t it, perhaps more so than at any other time is our past history?
Sadly and stupidly we all still seem anxious to try destroying each other all the time, either in Ukraine, Palestine, Central Africa and the Middle East, to name but a few, but surprisingly, still the wonderful discoveries go on being made, possibly even accelerated because of the wars.
As happened in World War Two, which brought us jet engines, penicillin and, nuclear power, though whether the last item has brought us good, or bad is still under debate!
I guess it all began, in historical times, when humans learned to make metal blades and to carve and move very large blocks of stone, one of the major ways of proving your power in those days.
A prime example of this tendency is still on show in Egypt with its pyramids and colossal buildings, though similar things were also going on in South America, (Machu Picchu), China, (the Great Wall), Britain, (Stonehenge), and many other examples throughout the world. Size was definitely important!
Later came the great eras of engineering from Rome, with many of their amazing works in roads and aqueducts still standing today, Greece, the creators of mathematics, science, philosophy, and Italy, the home of great religion, and creators of the magnificent and gigantic Parthenon.
Then, for some reason, the Earth hit a flat spot, which we call the Middle, or the Dark Ages, several centuries when not too much was made in the way of human progress, and a lot of the great discoveries of the past became lost or disbelieved.
It was a time when the Earth was thought to be flat, but it was at the very centre of the Universe, with even the sun rotating around us, rather than the other way round!
God was all powerful, both in government and in spirit, the answer to everything, (and woe betide you if you disagreed with the doctrines of the church!). The great accomplishments of this period tended to be glory attained through the winning of wars or the over-running of someone else’s country, like the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans taking over Celtic Britain, than in solid objects or ideas
The next great leap forward came with the Renaissance, a time of discovery and beauty in the field of art and music and literature. Again, size was important, and many of the great works of the period tended to be enormous paintings, covering whole walls or ceilings of some of the great buildings of the day - think of the Sistine Chapel in Rome or the Statue of David.
Next in the line of ‘progress’ we have the Industrial Revolution, a time when the world can blame, or congratulate, lowly little Great Britain, for its international success, one of the greatest mysteries the world has known. Why should such a small country become the greatest power, (for good and bad), in the world, with an Empire covering most of the known surface?
I suppose a lot of the blame or otherwise should go to a fairly small group of men, whose ideas coincided at that time; people like Stephenson, the inventor of the steam engine and the locomotive, Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, an American, but his ideas were snatched and developed by the British, where James Hargreaves invented the spinning Jenny; all big machinery items, while other engineers came up with the massive water pumps for drainage and waste, machines which are even now treated as great works of engineering art.
I guess the next period of accelerated development would be The Second World War, the period first mentioned at the beginning of this blog, so I need not go into it any further.
After the war was when the greatest change of all took place.
It was, and still is, the time when small became the champion of progress instead of the historical large everyone had always lived with and respected. In the seventy or more years since the end of The War, virtually everything has become smaller, faster, more efficient and to a large extent cheaper than they ever were before, and many of them never even existed in the 1940’s anyway.
Take the transistor for example; the many years, since radios were invented, signals were converted by valves, enormous heat producing things, looking like light bulbs and requiring a lot of electrical power to operate – but the transistor completely altered all that. Suddenly, radios were smaller, cooler and giving better sound than previously. And not only that, but the transistor also led us to personal computers, smart telephones and clever watches as well.
Nowadays we take ultra-small as being the norm, each new discovery smaller than anything that had gone before, and most being more efficient.
We have DNA, a molecule every one of us has in every cell of our bodies, with every DNA molecule, if it could be stretched out, being nearly a meter long! Even the atom, which we all learned as kids was the ultimate thing in ‘small’, is now known to comprise a multitude of even smaller articles.
By the way, I looked up atom sizes, just out of interest and it said, if you took a bundle of hydrogen atoms and spread them, one atom thick on the head of a pin, it would require ten million atoms to do the job. Makes you think, doesn’t it!
© 2023 Brian Lee
