POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE WAS THE BEST THING SINCE SLICED-BREAD! Hey! Its Wednesday already!?! Wow! Strange...just peeked at my tv. The newsperson just flashed todays headline from the Post. In bold letters it screams: PUSH COMES TO SHOVE! Its about the subway pusher who was thankfully apprehended yesterday. Strange--my post a couple of days ago was practically titled the same thing! Am I becoming a prophet? Well, Im not going to rush out to be fitted for a robe and sandals---not just yet. I still need a lot of practice; Im still puzzled by my trash collectors unpredictability! When I was coming up the magazine I found most interesting was Popular Science! I couldnt wait to get my hands on an issue. Of course nothing measured-up to my comic book collection--in size and importance--but Popular Science was a young boys--- whose imagination was perpetually whetted--dream come true! I would find a corner in the house or just shut distracting racket down to tolerable background noise. Then I would lose myself in the pages of experimental flying machines, sleek, bullet-shaped watercraft, rocket suits, computers, space stations and robots. The glossy was a signing-off of a childs fantasy. Many of the things you read about in your science fiction books and magazines egg-head scientists, engineers and rogue inventors were working hard to make them a reality. Big mouth Ralph Kramden wouldnt have to uppercut his nagging wife to the moon, one day soon he could just stick her on one of the bullet Lunar shuttles and banish her there for a week or so. Everything in those pages were presented in such a practical and logical way, that not only did they seem possibilities but around-the-corner inevitabilies. My two favorites were always the prophetic one-man rocket suit and the flying saucer. This wasnt wild fantasy. In the early fifties scientist and engineers were hard at work trying to make these things. The Germans had already worked out a saucer prototype by the close of the second world war. Nazi scientists had even gotten a primative rocket-suit going. They envisioned elite squadrons of German commandos flying in under the cover of darkness and landing to the rear of enemy lines. There were also a rash of UFO sightings all over the world. The official government position was that they did not exist--in the meanwhile they were working feverishly to learn the dynamics and understand the propulsion principles of the machines they claimed didnt exist in order to construct their own. Popular Science was a cousin to the other magazine Popular Mechanics. The former continued where the latter left off; and my comics, science fiction books and magazines were the carrots that these other guys were chasing. It was all very clear: The Buck Rogers stuff of interplanetary space travel, death rays, jetpacks, invisibility cloaks and all--were actually dress rehearsals for what was to be! Only time, effort and ingenuity effectively separated fantasy from fact! Einstein, Newton, Leonardo, Tesla, Welles, Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, Ben Franklin, Jules Verne, Oppenheimer, Archimedes and other trailblazers and visionaries proved that! Whats fiction today can very likely be fact tomorrow! A lot of stuff I read about in Popular Mechanics as a wide-eyed child theyve already done, are doing or are about to do. Theyve landed people on the moon, invented lasers, personal computers, satellite communications, cloned tissue, skyping,sent probes to planets and into interstellar space. My science fiction books and magazines foresaw it all, Popular Science seconded it, and engineers and scientists simply worked it out. Tomorrow inevitably becomes today, and the future melts into the past. My mother saw my preoccupation with reading as a clear sign of pure shiftlessness. She wasnt entirely wrong. To compound it she thought the stuff I read was junk. No matter what she thought, she never discouraged me from reading whatever I wished. Im thankful for that!
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:48:20 +0000