76-19-A5
- Main Page \ Reagan Radio Commentaries \ 1977
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Kettering[edit]
Transcript[edit]Whether you believe the age of miracles is past or not, there's every reason to believe that works of man which seem like miracles still have an unlimited future. I'll be right back. Our sons and daughters will in their lifetime undoubtedly see things almost impossible for us to imagine, but in my opinion the generation to which I belong will have had an experience they will not know. There have only been a few periods at most in man's history when a single generation presided over a great transition. Our generation was one of those. We went from the horse and buggy to travel in outer space and to the miracles of communication by which you were hearing my voice. But I don't want to sound like that man back in the late 1800s who wanted to close down the U.S. Patent Office because everything had been invented. Nor do I want to sound boastful or smug about the miracles that became commonplace in our lifetime. Each generation sees farther than the generation that preceded it because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Back in 1943, when radio had opened a new world to us, General Motors had a great sunday afternoon program of symphonic music. On October 3rd of that year, C.F. Kettering, a General Motors vice president and director of research, made a short address on radio. He called attention to how much we all owe the generations that preceded us. Speaking of how radio could carry the music of the orchestra all over the world, he said the elements of radio had been developing over a hundred years. Then surprisingly this remarkable engineering genius said that in truth the miracle of radio had started 600 years before Christ—2500 years ago. He made it clear it was only a vague weak thought at that time when a Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, found that by rubbing amber he produced a force that would pick up straws. Two thousand, two hundred years later, Queen Elizabeth's physician in England, Sir William Gilbert did a little playing around with the idea and called the phenomenon he produced electricity. Sixty years later, a German, von Gueriche, built a machine that generated static electricity. A century later Benjamin Franklin identified positive and negative electricity and proved electricity and lightning were one and the same. Kettering went on in his radio address and told how in 1820 a Dane named Oersted proved that electricity would produce magnetism. The idea was moving faster; Faraday discovered the principle of the electric motor, Morse and Bell came along and used the idea to communicate by way of the telegraph and the telephone. Edison lighted the world with it and Marconi and DeForest laid the foundation for radio. Pointing out how these men unknowing of each other for the most part spread and and separated over 2500 years brought that vague idea to a force that literally changed the face of the Earth, Kettering spoke of how indestructible an idea is. He also said that there have only been a few thousand such thought cultivators in all man's history and without them we might still be living in caves. Mr. Kettering had saved his surprise for the last. He closed his speech saying, "We might go back 2500 years to 600 B.C. and find out why the amber picked up the straws. We don't know that yet. And he added, If we did, I believe we could open up new fields that might be quite as important as the electric light the telephone or the radio. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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