... the march of progress

Once again, we’re back to that honorable task of retrieving interesting but forgotten events from the dustbin of history, and once again we’ve done it with the help of This Day in History. This time we learn that on today’s upload date:

And of course there’s an interesting comment there on the integration of new technologies into our lives. It’s not exactly the somewhat Luddite-like attitude that pits unaided human effort against the machine and, depending on which folk-story you read, either emerges victorious or maintains its self-esteem in defeat. Yet on the other hand it’s not the unstoppable march of progress, never looking back and never defeated, either.

In this particular case it’s hard not to make comparisons to another famous race, that between the tortoise and the hare. In that race the hare didn’t break down but was instead defeated by it’s own hubris. Maybe there’s a subtext of that in our story as well. Ultimately, of course, the steam locomotive had the upper hand (until it was replaced by some new invention), but I can picture to myself the satisfaction of the anti-technology faction when their horse won the race. Maybe it collapsed immediately afterwards, but I didn’t find any mention of that.


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