162
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162
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COMMUNICATIONS & TRANSPORTATION
April 15,1982, [sic] and Verna and I are on the last lap of a three-week trip to Turkey, A three minute telephone call to Sonoma, from Frankfurt Germany, informs our daughter we will be leaving in one hour. The plane will leave at 10:30 a.m. Frankfort time, and arrive in San Francisco at 11:30 a.m. San Francisco time, the same day. We fly at an elevation of 30,000 feet and a speed of 500 miles per hour, and cross a time zone every hour. We will travel almost as fast as the sun, by taking the flight close to the Arctic Circle. The sun appears to stand still as it shines in the window for the entire trip.
This would have been a miracle the day I helped my father string new telephone wire into the ranch house in Western Nebraska on a warm June day in 1916. We had a phone before that date but the barbed wire on the top of the fence posts made a very poor connection, and it was difficult for us to talk to the neighbors that were on the same line. Our call to the phone was two long and two short rings. Some times, neighbors would carry on a three, or four-way conversation, a common social occasion. With the new wire we could now reach a central operator in Moyer's drug store in Crawford. This made it possible to contact other party lines and make long distance calls.
Our transportation in 1916 was as different from that of 1982 as was our communications. The morning we finished stringing the new wire, Dad hitched Charley, a dappled gray, high-spirited horse to the small buggy that was used for fast travel, and go to the post office and pick up or weekly mail. There was normally room for two adults in the one seat, but if my brother who was then 8 years old, would sit close to me, we took the space of one adult and Dad would let us ride with him to go to the post office and pick up the weekly mail.
Will the next 80 years bring the change in communication and transportation that the last 80 have brought? The dialed cal from Frankfurt to Sonoma took no longer than it did to make the two long rings and the two short ones. The clarity of voice surpassed the old country line. The hour that it took to cover the 5 miles to the post office with Old Charley and the buggy was the same length as the hour it took us in flight to cover the 500-mile time zone.
In 1994 we are talking about the super communication highway, and space travel is already here.
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Metzger Memories
