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This reminds me of Bertha Benz who made the first long-distance automobile trip in 1888. Bertha wanted to convince her husband Karl that his invention had grea

by 1e-9 6y ago

This reminds me of Bertha Benz who made the first long-distance automobile trip in 1888. Bertha wanted to convince her husband Karl that his invention had great potential and should be marketed. So, early one morning, without telling anyone, she loaded up her two teenaged sons and set off over 65 miles of wagon tracks between Mannheim and Pforzheim. Through ingenuity and determination, she overcame numerous obstacles to complete the illegal trip. Fascinating woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz

irrational 6y ago
Wow. Some of their kids lived until the early 1970s. The things they lived to see from the late 1880s to the early 1979s include so many things like 2 world wars, the invention of the airplane to jet flights being commonplace, men going to the moon, from early automobiles to fast race cars, from classical music to disco (oh, wait...)
- jacquesm 6y ago
  My grandmother lived roughly during the same era. This led to some funny things, she would answer the telephone in her bedroom but refused to have a TV there because 'If I can see them, who is to guarantee they can't see me?'. Tech progress in the last two hundred years is nothing short of incredible, plenty of what we see today as normal would have been absolute magic just a few short decades ago. This hit me hard when driving in Arizona somewhere and having a cell phone conversation with another dutch person who was driving in Canada, both of us on our tri-band cell phones with roaming contracts. Crystal clear, as if we were standing next door to each other and neither of us realized that we were abroad (and on another continent than normally) until halfway into the conversation. That's how normal it has become to be able to talk to everybody all the time.
  - toper-centage 6y ago
    Little did she know that they couldn't see her... Yet. And today tracking and surveillance is so common place that people became complacent.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    If you dropped a modern kid into 1975, so less than 50 years, so much would be strange. No Internet, no cell phone, effectively no PCs, just a bit of mail order, scheduled TV, etc. I sometimes only half-joke that if I got dropped into my first tech job (as a product manager) in the mid-80s, I'd quit after a week because I would be so frustrated trying to do my job. (And we even had things like email.)

by 1e-9 6y ago

irrational 6y ago

Wow. Some of their kids lived until the early 1970s. The things they lived to see from the late 1880s to the early 1979s include so many things like 2 world wars, the invention of the airplane to jet flights being commonplace, men going to the moon, from early automobiles to fast race cars, from classical music to disco (oh, wait...)

jacquesm 6y ago
My grandmother lived roughly during the same era. This led to some funny things, she would answer the telephone in her bedroom but refused to have a TV there because 'If I can see them, who is to guarantee they can't see me?'. Tech progress in the last two hundred years is nothing short of incredible, plenty of what we see today as normal would have been absolute magic just a few short decades ago. This hit me hard when driving in Arizona somewhere and having a cell phone conversation with another dutch person who was driving in Canada, both of us on our tri-band cell phones with roaming contracts. Crystal clear, as if we were standing next door to each other and neither of us realized that we were abroad (and on another continent than normally) until halfway into the conversation. That's how normal it has become to be able to talk to everybody all the time.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  Little did she know that they couldn't see her... Yet. And today tracking and surveillance is so common place that people became complacent.
- ghaff 6y ago
  If you dropped a modern kid into 1975, so less than 50 years, so much would be strange. No Internet, no cell phone, effectively no PCs, just a bit of mail order, scheduled TV, etc. I sometimes only half-joke that if I got dropped into my first tech job (as a product manager) in the mid-80s, I'd quit after a week because I would be so frustrated trying to do my job. (And we even had things like email.)