April 4, 2018 at 5:30 p.m.
Duck Ponderings: Time for Scotty's transporter
I started thinking about all the inventions in my lifetime, phones in particular. There are many younger people who would find the early party line system amusing, a system I still vividly remember experiencing while growing up.
Dad never wanted any part of it; Mom seemed to enjoy it. She would often pick up the phone only to hear another neighbor already on line. The rules were something like this:
- To talk for a reasonable period of time
- To not interrupt a conversation unless for an emergency
- To wait patiently for your turn
- To not listen in on a conversation
- To hang up the phone afterward so that the line could be used again
Then, there were the rule breakers. It would make for some interesting table talk for the seven or so neighbors sharing the line during family dinners.
"I can't believe she cut right in on us and then had the nerve to tell us our exact time!"
"Someone continues to pick up their phone and listen in on our private conversation!"
"A neighbor stopped by today asking if our phone was off the hook."
Despite the challenges of such a phone system, it was celebrated in our rural home just like the electricity before and the indoor plumbing afterward. Like Bud, I also recall our first early black and white television. The one my parents purchased came with a bonus gift of toys through an interesting marketing technique.
During the late '60s, I really enjoyed watching Star Trek and somehow convinced the entire family to join me as we gathered around our one and only set in the living room. The Star Trek crew had this unique device called the communicator which was quite smaller and not limited to a short cord as the phone in our home. No matter where they were transported in the universe, Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, or ... could communicate with Uhura on the starship Enterprise. There were interferences that added to the plot, but they seemed "logical" and were always resolved just in time to avoid a tragedy.
Viewers of the show wondered if we would actually ever have such a device. Well, many of us now have one. It looked much like the flip cell phone I still carry. I'm just wondering how far away we are from developing a transporter and being able to say, "Beam me up, Scotty!"[[In-content Ad]]
