Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (reading diary .txt) 📕

rate of all kinds of accidents that kill one person in the United States every six minutes and injure someone every three seconds; the difficulty of consumers in getting reliable information on products because of advertising that exaggerates little differences; the competitive system in which one man’s success in business may throw three into the tragedy of bankruptcy; unemployment; the insecurity of men and women in the forty to sixty-five age range who have difficulty in finding well-paying, dignified employment; price-fixing; industrial strikes; the squeeze on the small businessman; monopoly; the graft of politicians and the hypocrisy of lawmakers; high taxes; senior citizens, restless in retirement; unscientific tampering with our land, resulting in floods, dust storms, and the loss of valuable forests; the fertile acres wasted in the growth of tobacco that is detrimental to the health of mankind; water shortage that hampers agriculture and industry; the use of pesticides in ways that injure people and kill wildlife; agricultural practices and processing techniques that result in low quality foods; choosing foods by taste and habit instead of by vitamin-mineral-protein-unsaturated fat content; immature personalities reinforced by the deficiencies of television, radio, and motion pictures; the prevalence of inadequate values based on wealth and social prestige, which seldom bring happiness when achieved; and the list may go on and on and on.

The purpose of this book is to show how the mind and heart of man can solve these apparently “unsolvable” problems. The readers of this book may be “pioneers” in a deeply significant way when the long-range story of civilization is written.

3. Predicting the Future

At every point in history [warns Dr. George Gallup] man has assumed that civilization has reached its zenith. He has smugly refused to place himself on a scale of time that reaches thousands and millions of years into the future as well as into the past. Looked at from the vantage point of 8,000 years hence—approximately the period of recorded history—man’s progress up to the present time may appear far less impressive than it does today.

George Gallup, The Miracle Ahead (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, 1964), p. ix.

We have been here such a short time that we could almost be called “newborn.” If you were to use a twenty-four hour clock to represent the time since life began on earth, it would show that man has only been in existence since the last minute of the twenty-fourth hour; only during the last few seconds of the last minute has modern man begun to use scientific methods to lead him to the most effective ways to get things done. We are just now beginning to hit our stride. More new knowledge has been created during the twentieth century than in the previous billion years. Change is everywhere.

How does one go about predicting the most probable changes in man’s future? One might at first think that scientists could give us worthwhile information on the future. They’re busy hammering out the next step. They’re running experiments to find out what works and what doesn’t. They’re patiently sifting facts and theories that form the stepping stones to the future. But a glance at the record shows that few scientists have been able to anticipate future developments correctly. They have often been woefully wrong in giving opinions on the probability of events even a decade in the future.

About eighty years ago Thomas Edison, after his brilliant success with the phonograph and carbon microphone, became interested in using electricity to make light. When the news of this got around, the securities of the gas companies began to drop. The British Parliament appointed a committee to investigate the possibility of developing an electric light. The concensus of the experts was that Edison’s ideas were, “good enough for our transatlantic friends ... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”

C. D. Darlington the brilliant English geneticist said:

It is no accident that bacteria were first seen under the microscope by a draper, ... that oxygen was first isolated by a Unitarian minister, that the theory of infection was first established by a chemist, the theory of heredity by a man who was unfitted to be a university instructor in either Botany or Zoology.

At the beginning of this century, most scientists unanimously agreed that an airplane was probably impossible, and, even if it worked, it was impractical. The eminent American astronomer Simon Newcomb declared with finality:

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.

Fortunately, the Wright brothers did not have time to worry about Newcomb’s conclusions. They were too busy bolting a gasoline engine onto some wings in their bicycle shop in Dayton. Here’s what William H. Pickering, a well-known scientist, had to say after the Wright brothers had flown their airplane at Kitty Hawk:

The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships. ... It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.

Another popular fallacy is to expect enormous speed to be obtained. It must be remembered that the resistance of the air increases as the square of the speed and the work as the cube. ... If with 30 h.p. we can now attain a speed of 40 m.p.h., then in order to reach a speed of 100 m.p.h. we must use a motor capable of 470 h.p. ... it is clear that with our present devices there is no hope of competing for racing speed with either our locomotives or our automobiles.

Scientists may have struck out when it