A Brave New World

A man stopped me while I was walking through the stationary engine area at the Southern Illinois Antique Machinery show this past weekend. “This was the AI (Artificial Intelligence) of its day,” he said, gesturing at the engine displays. “Farmers were looking at these and trying to figure out how to use them.”

He was absolutely right. Can you picture the stir made by stationary engines when they arrived on the scene just before the turn of the last century? They didn’t, of course, hit the market all at once, and the technology was a work in progress. Designs were launched and abandoned with regularity as inventors conjured innovation out of thin air.

In my mind’s eye, I like to picture farmers sizing up the newfangled engines. They’d barely figured out steam engines when the next shiny thing arrived and they had to come up to speed fast. Imagine men who’d known only horse farming suddenly grappling with governors, rpms and cooling systems.

Some surely dismissed the new technology as unworkable, untested and overpriced. Today, their grandsons, wary of the future, use the same terms to dismiss the latest technology. More than a few made loud pronouncements about letting someone else be the guinea pig.

Others were quick to adopt the new agricultural inventions. Imagine going from elbow grease to something new called an engine. Imagine the range of thoughts that must have washed over farmers as they began to sense not only an answer to the relentless toil of farming, but also what must have seemed limitless possibilities.

And so it is today, when a new generation eyes the latest arrival in the parade of technology. As they begin to sense the elimination of drudgery in their lives, they are also trying to stretch their imaginations to encompass previously unimaginable possibilities.