A different life in a different era ago, I had the fortune of playing around with the Siemens’ S10D - one of the first phones with color displays, launched in 1998. It was big, clunky piece of a phone — very much like an sat-phone. Fast forward to this age, and era - I now work on, and use an iPhone 6. Times change, and arguably in a faster fashion that we’re capable of understanding, or at least I’m unable to catch up with; catch up to so many, many things that keep changing around me.
Siemens’ S10D
What we don’t see, and realize is that these changes, they often take ages to come to pass; starting only as foresights, thoughts, ideas, and concepts. Something that I only realized after watching the video embedded below.
The Story Of Light
I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk … Can imagination picture what the future of this invention is to be! … We may talk by light to any visible distance without any conducting wire. - Alexander Graham Bell
This video is a part of bigger series of video productions, aptly titled as the Future Impossible series.
Future Impossible - The Story of Light from LonelyLeap.
What kind of genius does it take, to foresee that a ray of light from the Sun is capable of carrying sound? Enter Alexander Graham Bell. He had this magical foresight, which a very few people are even capable of just relating to today; the kind of foresight that pioneers of observation, from a begotten era possessed. They utilized, and questioned everything in their sights, while only thinking of creating a future that they somehow knew was possible; they somehow knew that what they foresaw would elevate our species, push us further. The only person in this era that I can think of, in comparison to those pioneers, is Elon Musk.
We take so many, many of these things for granted. For example, in the video embedded above you’ll see how we harnessed light to shape a future in which we can communicate across continents instantaneously; the technology that we use to communicate today, has been in the works for a long, long time. How Alexander Graham Bell’s concept of harnessing light, was taken further, and further to accomplish something that was unimaginable only a generation ago. How we hit limits, and caps as we kept on growing, and how we dismissed them.
All of this just fills you up with a certain excitement; a certain hunger to see what our future tomorrow, as a species, holds.
