things change, things evolve,

The thread about the transparent wood reminded me of a conversation I had with my grandfather 35 years ago. It was one of the very few times, we sat alone on the deck, had beer and he opened up and told me some things I did not really think about. I had just shown him our home computer and some of the things possible to see and find at all 8 or 9 kb per second. He was born in 1902, he was an 8th generation American, but had to learn English when he was 5 so he could go to public school because they only spoke German and even Churches had services only in German in that area of PA. If there was a fire, you ran to the corner and pulled the fire alarm and waited so you could show the fire depart, horse and buggy how to get to the house with the fire if it wasn't apparent. He was 11 when electric line and phone lines were strung down the street. A neighbor actually got a phone, but neighbors getting calls and wanting to make calls were such a bother, that they got rid of it. When world war one started he was a part time bicycle telegram delivery boy. People started to cry and hide as soon as he turned down a residential street to deliver. The grieving by customers was too much for him. He was the second teenager in Allentown PA to get a driver's license and got a job for a car sales dealership. His parents finally got a phone about 1920. When the local dept store got a radio, it was a huge deal. they scheduled a special demonstration on the side walk out side the store and had the radio blaring. My great grand father was promised he could get hymns on the radio and bought one. Then couldn't find a station with religious music. Pappy must have been a wild child. He kept working in the car industry for a while. When the depression hit, he became a PA Railroad Policeman, part of the private cadres of police responsible for clearing out homeless camps, hobos, etc. He did not have the stomach to treat people so violently and quit. Of all bizarre things, he was befriended by and old man, who sold him a tiny ice cream road side stand for $100 and lifetime free ice cream. He and grandma, built it up during the depression into a restaurant/gas station ice cream stand. They raised kids, and when the second world war ended, they were both growing tired of the long hours in the business. A guy from Sinclair Oil walked in one day and offered them more than they ever could imagine for the place. Said it would be ideal for their new concept of quick stop store gas station combos. So they sold. Packed up the LaSalle with daughters and spent 14 months touring all 48 continental states. While in California visiting relatives, he saw a television and marveled over the difference between listening to a ball game on the radio and watching it. He and the relative started looking into some crazy idea of vending televisions to put in homes that would turn on for 5 cents an hour. People could get TV without laying out the up front cash. While they were considering the idea, the jump in manufacturing them dropped the price to the point that they passed.

Pap said the difference they saw when they sold the business and left and when they returned 14 months later, there were new and better roads, bridges, housing developments spreading out into the countryside. In December 1940, they looked at a new GE refrigerator. He said it was only $20 less than a new Pontiac. Ten years later everybody could afford a frig. He saw a color TV during a trip to Philadelphia about 1956. And when he thought there couldn't be much else to come, saw a microwave oven at a restaurant trade show. They made cupcakes in 90 seconds. But folks in the crowd wouldn't eat them because they feared they might be radio active, Also, told me shoe stores back then often had x-ray machines. you put the shoes on, stood on the machine and looked through the viewer to see how cramped your toe bones were. dangerous as can be no lead shield. Cars with air conditioning, houses with air conditioning, little home microwave ovens, He still owned a business when he got electronic cash registers that did away with adding things up and pulling cranks, no worries about the amount of change to give etc. Now computers.

He had friends die of polio as a kid. Measles took his infant brother. By the time of our talk, vaccines were saving thousands from such disease. A heart transplant had been done 20 years earlier and Shelly's Frankenstein story about using dead body parts, at least for bone grafts was common place. His friends received new knees in time to dance at grandchildren's weddings. Heart valves were also a common operation for his neighbors in the retirement villas.

Then he looked at my kids playing in the yard and said "what miracles are they going to see.?"

Great story Perry. Thanks for sharing it!

What Frederick said. He lived through amazing changes. I’m old enough to have used those X-ray machines in shoe stores. Fortunately they quickly disappeared.

Great story! Last night my wife and I attended the annual Christmas dinner of my local woodworking club. Considering I am deaf, hearing with the aid of cochlear implant, it was fun conversing with others at that dinner. Like your grandfather, Perry, I wonder what changes my great grandkids will see?

Great perspective on the 20th Century from someone who lived it. And to think the pace of change and innovation is only speeding up.

What a refreshing outlook by your grandad on the next generation. Thanks for sharing.

I also think about how things have evolved over the years.

When I started medical school, the building next to my apartment was an old TB Sanitarium. There were still some iron lungs in the hall, though fortunately no patients were in them. My next-door neighbor was Jonas Salk's son. I actually met him once and had an amazing conversation. Truly a man who changed the world.

When my father went to medical school, DNA wasn't discovered yet. Weren't many drugs that worked that could be used. Although, penicillin did work way back then.

I owned one of the first calculators ever made. Nixie tube display, AC plug in. Was actually suspended for bringing it in to a test in school. They said I was using an illegal computing device. In other words, cheating. Then it later became mandatory to take the SATs. Now it lives in a computer museum.

In my lifetime we have gone from staring at the moon to landing on it. And now, there is even a sports car orbiting the Earth. Wouldn't have guessed that one.

When I started my anesthesia residency, the mortality rate just from anesthesia in the OR was 1/30,000 patients. An older surgeon told me that he did evening rounds to see which of his patients on the wards was dead. Now, anesthesia mortality is on the order of 1/2,000,000 patients. An amazing accomplishment, due to better monitors, better drugs, and better personnel.

There was this new drug, a synthetic opiate that we started using that was so much safer than morphine. It was called fentanyl. Now, 40 years later, that "safe" drug is killing countless people on the streets. Never saw that one coming either.

I went under the streets of Cambridge, to Harvard's cyclotron, and zapped infant's retinas with proton beams to cure them of retinoblastoma - a disease that had caused blindness in many infants before then, and usually one of their parents. The cyclotron was previously used for the Manhattan project to build the bombs. Now, years later, it prevented blindness. The disease was rarely diagnosed in time then. Now it is commonly found from the reflections of cell phone flashes looking weird to parents.

I had a laser zap my corneas (LASIK), and magically I didn't need glasses.

I won the county science fair 50ish years ago by building a model of a crazy, newfangled idea. A solar house. Everyone was amazed, but none of the judges thought anyone would ever build one. Now I, and millions of others, live in them. And definitely never thought about electric cars growing up.

It is amazing to think what people who are over 100 years old now have seen in their lifetimes. Truly amazing.

My dad, born in 1911, said he had seen mankind go from ox carts to a man on the moon. In late seventies, he went with me to get tires on company truck as tire place was across from the train station (he loved trains.) In tire shop was a 1918 Cadillac. Dad told owner that the first automobile he ever rode in was a 1918 Cadillac. Owner asked him where was it he rode in his first car, and upon hearing where, told him that he was looking that same car, sixty years later!

I remember ,over 40 years ago, talking with my wife's grandmother about people she knew who fought in the Civil War. She died at almost 102, and traveled from Indiana to Oregon, South Dakota and Nevada in a Model T, when her husband got a job in the Indian Bureau as a teacher on reservations.