We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.
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This reminds me of when you reminded us in a post within the past few years to pause before complaining about the experience and remember what an insane miracle commercial jet flight is.
You reminded me of the line from the great British comedian Bill Bailey: "Mercury: nothing. Venus: nothing! Earth: fridge magnets, houmous, Spandau Ballet... anything you want!" We live in/on an insane miracle.
Great link. Rural electrification was life-changing in the USA.
I love that this is just its own website and this is all it does. Elegant and lovely.
I helped my Dad renovate our house in the 1960’s. He had been using hand drills and hand saws. For this large renovation he bought an electric drill and table saw. Corded - no batteries.
His father built a cottage (with his three sons) using hand tools. They cut down the trees for a start. I’d used some of those tools and the effort to cut logs was exhausting.
I love my DeWalt with small rechargeable batteries.
The generational progression, for this one narrow facet, is amazing to me.
I thought about this comment this morning when reading an article in the New York Times (gift link) that talks about another facet of electrical technology that, unlike the generational progression described here, hasn't fundamentally changed since the late 1800s: transformers (a widely used piece of equipment throughout our electricity grid). There's a cool side by side photo of hand-winding the copper coils in 1942 vs today. Also, this:
@kenzie B: Yeah, that article, too, is a heck of a read. But yes, I sometimes think about the changes that my dad saw within his lifetime: he was born in 1925. Only 101 years ago! We take so much for granted.
Over the years I've thought many times that the royals of old would have envied what I have access to every day, and so much of it I could live without. Just give me hot showers and I feel like I'll be able to figure out the rest.
In 1999, I was in South Africa as part of a graduate school program to work on the ANC archives at the University of Fort Hare. Fort Hare, IIRC, is a small town and there aren't any cities nearby. One day we stayed at the uni a bit later than usual, and left after the sun had set (we weren't staying in the town, we were half-hour drive away). The drive took us through a small village at the base of the hill to the plateau where "the lodge" was (where we were staying), and just after the village at the base of the hill, the road took a sharp right turn (this is not a car crash story though).
That evening, as we drove home, we reached the turn after the village, but I hadn't seen the village at all (it was immediately adjacent to the road on both sides, you couldn't miss it). I realized they had no lighting, so they probably had no electricity. To this day I am grateful for electricity (especially for food refrigeration) but also potable water from the tap (which just seems so amazing to have, really). Now I want to mention the book "The Ghost Map" (by Johnson) and also add modern medicine. Vaccines! Just a year or two ago I learned that we only have known about galaxies for maybe 125 years or so (I am sure there is good information about that online somewhere). We do live in amazing times.
This is the bargain we (or maybe Descartes? Or Francis Bacon?) made without knowing it. Pretending that we are the lone subjects in a universe of objects grants incredible analytical, transformative, and creative powers. We became as gods by covering our eyes to the animate world and then extracted the wealth of the natural world for our benefit. But this move made us cosmically lonely and life meaningless.
We've all benefitted in countless ways from this shift and I don't pretend that I would be happier living in fear of Mongol raids but with a local god I could make sacrifices to. But something was lost in this transition, and my hope is that we can find a way forward that keeps (most) of the benefits of science and technology while bringing back a recognition of relationship with and responsibility to the more than human world.
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