Saturday Challenge: Technology

From Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Fun Challenge:

1)  Julie Goucher, on her Anglers Rest blog, has a long-running weekly blog theme called The Book Of Me.  One of her weekly prompts is about Technology.  We'll use that this week!

2)  For this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - please address these issues:

·       What technology changes did your ancestors see?

·       What technology changes have you seen?

·       Did your family own one of those early changes? - such as television

·       Do you like or dislike technology?

·       What do you think has been the best technological change in your lifetime and historically?

Technology. This is a broad subject of so many different things over the years. There’s the cliché “from the horse and buggy age to the automobile age.” Actually it could be expanded with transportation alone. My first ancestors set foot on what would become U.S. soil off of boats so small that it seems incredible that they made it across the ocean.

Here they traveled everywhere on foot. There was no other form of transportation. Horses and oxen had not arrived yet and when they did, were few and very precious. They were more likely to be used to do heavy work in clearing the land than to transport people. This would be especially true of the oxen that could handle heavier jobs even than horses. Besides, where would they go? There weren’t highways then! At best there would be a narrow path through the woods to a neighbor’s house. Near the coast, there would be a beach to walk along. But that too would have brambles blocking paths along with large rocks, streams, and cuts where water had washed into the ocean during a heavy storm. Walking was the only way to go.

On the other end, we have many more ways to get around than the automobile. Cars and trucks today take many more forms alone than what could be imagined when that phrase was first coined. Think about the word "automobile" itself; loosely translated, the word means self-propelled. This was a new concept at the time, that a vehicle could move under it’s own power. The only other type that was available then that could do that would be a train.

Today we still have trains, cars and trucks along with buses to get us from one place to another. Airplanes take us to places in hours that would have taken days, weeks or even months to get to in the 1600s. Space ships of various kinds take us to outer space, the moon and possibly soon to far off planets.

All these changes, and yet, we still use the basic form of walking much of the time. Bicycles, an invention before many of those mentioned, are still in use. Horses are used for riding and pulling various vehicles by some out of necessity and others for the enjoyment factor. There is good and bad in all advances. While moving forward with them, we also need to remember and hang onto the good parts of the older technologies as well.