Glorious Inventions And More Inventions

We truly live in a remarkable time. Over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, humanity has barreled forward with marvelous inventions that have made our lives easier, more fulfilling, and enjoyable.
There's nothing really new here, but every so often we must pause and reflect on how far we've come in such a short time. Think about it. A mere hundred years ago, we didn't even have television, computers, airplanes, or even indoor plumbing. Well, there was some indoor plumbing, but it sure wasn't in every home, not even in every city.

You grandparents and great-grandparents had very different daily lives than we do today. Life was hard and busy. Much of their time was spent in daily chores and preparations. Clothes were washed by scrubbing them on washboards and hanging them out to dry. Meals were cooked over fires; food was canned in glass jars, smoked, salted, and frozen - and it didn't come in packages.

People communicated through party telephone lines, if they even had telephone lines available. Otherwise, it was through letters and it could take weeks for a letter to arrive. If something was urgent, some messenger would knock on your door to deliver a wired message sent by Morse Code. News could only be found in the newspapers or through the local gossip.

If you had some kind of math problem to do, like how many eggs you could get for 50 cents, you had to do it yourself. Calculators weren't there to help, unless you knew how to use an abacus. Most people don't even know what an abacus is anymore.

Now, we have microwaves, package dinners, e-mail, satellite TV, airplane travel, and medical inventions that our grandparents couldn't even conceive of. There's things such as gamma cameras and nuclear cameras, gamma camera collimators and nuclear camera collimators that take pictures of your insides so doctors can see what's wrong with you.

We can instantly converse with someone thousands of miles away, and those doctors? Well, they can converse with specialists thousands of miles away, send them the images that those gamma cameras and nuclear camera collected and decide how to treat you.

Humankind has never grown so fast technologically in all of history. So, what's the point here? Reflect, marvel, consider, and ponder. Research and learn your history. Don't take things for granted and consider what life would be like without all these fantastic inventions. And if you still have grandparents, find out what life was like for them before. And imagine.