Four More Years Or FORTY More Years?

This is a post adapted from one of my Daddy Diaries blog posts for tesh.com

This is not a political rant.  We don’t do political rants on Tesh.com.  But it does have to do with politics, and it’s something that’s been on my mind as a Dad. 

The election is over.  The ads are off the air.  The robocalls have stopped.  The hate has (sort of) begun to recede.  It doesn’t matter who you voted for, I hope you voted.  If your people won, good for you.  If they lost, I’m sorry.  If you didn’t vote, you missed your chance to do something that could have made a difference, and that’s a shame.

We all have a challenge ahead of us as parents now that the election is over and we can concentrate on our lives and families.  Think of OUR parents, whether they were from the World War II era or the Vietnam era.  They all worked hard, often for the same company most of their adult life, to make sure WE had a better life than they did.  They knew the world could be better and tried their best to make it that way, not always for them, but always for us, their children. 

Despite their best intentions and hard work, the world may not be better for their children, otise known as US, than they would have wanted it to be.  It’s not their fault, it’s not our fault, there’s no time to be pointing fingers to whose fault it is.  As someone I used to work with often said, “it is what it is”. 

Every generation has wanted the next generation to have a better life than theirs.  I don’t hear people of my generation talking about that very often, often because we’re trying to figure out how to make our own lives better and not thinking about our children.  It’s a new world in a million different ways, ways our parents could have never predicted.  It’s not simple, it’s not perfect, but it is what it is.  And it’s the world our kids are growing up in, the world we’re supposed to be making better for them.

So we’re finished with all the partisanship and electioneering for four more years.  What about the next forty years?  Or the next eighty years?  What are you doing to make sure the world that our kids inherit from us is better than the world we live in right now?  Stop and think about it.  I’m guessing you can do more.  Let me know how you’re going to make the world better for your children, and THEIR children, in the comments below.

March 10, 1876: ‘Mr. Watson, Come Here … ‘ | This Day In Tech Via Wired.com

1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, from the next room.

The Scottish-born Bell had a lifelong interest in the nature of sound. He was born into a family of speech instructors, and his mother and his wife both had hearing impairments. While ostensibly working in 1875 on a device to send multiple telegraph signals over the same wire by using harmonics, he heard a twang.

That led him to investigate whether his electrical apparatus could be used to transmit the sound of a human voice. Bell’s journal, now at the Library of Congress, contains the following entry for March 10, 1876:

I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: “Mr. Watson, come here — I want to see you.” To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.

I asked him to repeat the words. He answered, “You said ‘Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.’” We then changed places and I listened at S [the speaker] while Mr. Watson read a few passages from a book into the mouthpiece M. It was certainly the case that articulate sounds proceeded from S. The effect was loud but indistinct and muffled.

Watson’s journal, however, says the famous quote was: “Mr. Watson come here I want you.”

That disagreement, though, is trifling compared to the long controversy over whether Bell truly invented the telephone. Another inventor, Elisha Gray, was working on a similar device, and recent books claim that Bell not only stole Gray’s ideas, but may even have bribed a patent inspector to let him sneak a look at Gray’s filing.

After years of litigation, Bell’s patents eventually withstood challenges from Gray and others — perhaps by right, perhaps by virtue of bigger backers and better barristers. In that respect, the controversy recalls the patent battle over the telegraph and foreshadows later squabbles over the automobile, the airplane, the spreadsheet, online shopping carts, web-auction software, and the look and feel of operating systems.

One thing we know for sure: Mr. Watson was at work that day in Bell’s lab. The telephone call did not interrupt his dinner with a special offer for home repairs or timeshare vacations in Florida.

Sources Various

Photo: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates speaking into the telephone using a model prototype in 1876. (Early Office Museum)

This article first appeared on Wired.com March 10, 2008.

See Also:

• Aug. 15, 1877: ‘Hello. Can You Hear Me Now?’
• Aug. 4, 1922: For Whom the Bell Tolls Not
• Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call
• Man Attempts Worlds Longest Telephone Conversation
• Phone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit
• Complete Wired.com coverage of cellphones
• June 25, 1876: Was Custer Outgunned at Little Bighorn?
• July 18, 1876: Royal Commissioners Wrinkle Their Noses
• Aug. 8, 1876: Edison Patents Mimeograph
• March 10: Jefferson the Paleontologist, Lincoln the Inventor
• March 10, 2000: Pop Goes the Nasdaq!

via wired.com

Few are as geeked about communications as I am. Its a little known fact that I worked for AT&T for a couple of years because I loved their product. Of course, that was before deregulation. Thanks to wired.com, I'm reminded that today is the anniversary of the day the telephone was invented, or so legend has it. There's a lot of backstory to the invention of the telephone, and just about every other communication device since then, but we will probably always mark today and Alexander Graham Bell as the day that led to all the wonders of electronic communication. Again, thanks to www.wired.com for sharing.

Posted via email from Mark Edwards 3.0

The Beatles - Live On The Ed Sullivan Show (Full Performance)

Hard to believe, but this happened on a Sunday night 47 years ago today.

I still have a 3 inch reel of audio tape with the performance. I remember my father holding a microphone up to the speaker of our Zenith console TV recording the Beatles songs and telling me I was seeing history. I was 5, I didn't understand it but I did love the Beatles.

I'm a lot older now, and I understand it completely. I've seen how the Beatles have influenced countless musicians and the entire world. I see how my middle son is completely obsessed (hopefully in a good way) with them. And I smile whenever I hear them.

I'm not sure I even know where to find a machine to safely play that tape my dad made on the Wollensak, but I thank the person who found it on video and shares it for all of us to enjoy.



But wait, there's more. Turns out today is also the 50th anniversary of the day the Beatles first played The Cavern Club in Liverpool. Here's the link from Rolling Stone.