"On December 23, 1947, three American scientists demonstrated the world's first transistor, built from a paperclip, gold foil, and a slab of shiny material called germanium. Fifty years later, transistors outnumbered humans by a million to one.
"The first phonograph records could play three minutes of music and had to be made one at a time. If one hundred copies were needed, the musician had to perform the same piece one hundred times! A century later, DVDs store two hours of high-quality sound and are produced in factories that stamp them out by the million."
You'll lose track of the number of times you say "Wow! I didn't know that!" as you read Anthony Wilson's How the Future Began: Communications! What makes Wilson's treatment extra special is his clever juxtapositioning of the past and the present, which puts some otherwise dry facts in context, making them both meaningful and memorable. Consider this:
"In the last twenty years, the cost of computing has come down a thousand times, while the power of a home computer has increased by a similar amount."A boring statistic -- until you continue reading and learn that
"If cars had improved as much, a family car would now be as powerful as a jet fighter plane and cost less than the price of a compact disc."
Wow!
It's Wilson's vision of the future, however, that's most riveting.
Some of his predictions are imminent and unsurprising. Who doubts, for example that by 2005 "portable computers will be voice-activated and recognize handwriting" or that cellular phones "will transmit and receive high-quality images as well as high fidelity sound"?
Others, although also believable, are slightly more fantastic. For example, Wilson says that:
Things don't get really scary, however, until Wilson looks into his crystal ball and predicts that:
Just to keep things in perspective though, the book also includes a feature called "Blurred Vision," which highlights past predictions that failed to come true!
Each of the book's five sections -- Living with Computers, Keeping in Touch, Entertainment, The World in Your Home, and Keeping Watch -- begins with a timeline, providing an immediate overview of the history and possible future of a particular kind of technology. The descriptions of how each type of technology -- including computers, movies, television, telephones, and satellites -- actually works are simple enough to be understandable, and technical enough to be accurate.
The book includes a glossary that defines terms as scientific as "neural net" and "package switching" and as cool as "artificial intelligence" and "knowbot." It also contains a list of Web sites that provide additional information about the future of technology; and the names of science centers and museums that further explore the history of communications.
Students in middle school and above will find How the Future Began: Communications, hard to put down. But if they do put it down, they'll pick it up again and again -- each time finding something that will make them say, "Wow! I didn't know that!"
Article by Article by Linda Starr
Education World®
Copyright © 2000 Education World
If you are unable to locate a copy of this book in your local bookstore, ask your bookseller to order it for you or contact the publisher directly.
How the Future Began: Communications, written by Anthony Wilson, is published by Larousse Kingfisher Chambers Inc., 95 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016.
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