Looking Back

A visit to a old post office museum in 2012 took me back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s and the type of work I was doing then, along with the equipment I used to do that work.

Looking back on some modern history

Way back around 1990 I visited a small museum which housed a lot of the communications equipment used in the 1950s.   Even then I was astounded to see that some of that equipment I had used on a daily basis in my own working life.  It included such items as Morse keys, Tele-printers and old valve-set radios.   These were the items I’d used daily during my years in the Navy and then, later the decade I spent as an aeradio operator in Civil Aviation.  I was even using some of this equipment as late as the 1970s  " and here it was…all obsolete. So much for modern history.

Today’s school leavers and how they study the modern history I lived through

Then I read about the examination subject matter of today’s school leavers; how they study World War Two, the Korean and Vietnam Conflicts in their Modern History exams and I think, “Goodness, I lived through those times!”   I can remember the search lights stabbing the darkness over London in 1941 and the ack-ack guns banging away at the Luftwaffe when I was a child.  I was an aeradio operator in Papua-New Guinea when American B52s were flying with their deadly loads out of Guam to bomb the Ho Chi Min trail.   I was an Antarctica expeditioner when I exchanged messages via Morse code with the Danish supply ship, Thala Dan in 1977.    It wasn’t that long ago, surely!

We are all living through history

We are all living through history, but we generally don’t realize it until we reach a certain age.  When I look at my own mother’s life; born in 1900 when the only flying machines were zeppelins.  The Wright brothers put their first, flimsy heavier-than-air machine into the sky in 1903, yet Mum was only sixty-nine when she saw Neil Armstrong via television, place a chunky, insulated boot on the surface of the Moon.    She’d seen life go from bicycles and horse-and-buggies to the motor vehicle age, and she was still around when personal computers first started to land on office desks.

What new things will the world bring to the youth of today?   We might say more and more sophisticated communication devices, and undoubtedly we’d be right.  But what else?  What great new thing is waiting to be pulled out of ‘God’s Cloud?’ " to  be discovered!   Will it be a tangible thing?   Will it be a something of the intellect which becomes common to all?    Will it be a complete shift in human qualities and values?    What will it, or it’s many its be?

Oh, what a wonderful world we live in…what a wonderful universe.  So much to see.  So much to do.  So much to become.   Think on these things…before you, too, start looking back on your own history.