Marilyn Thipthorpe
On June 20, 1840, Samuel Morse received a patent for an electric telegraph. His ideas for transmitting and recording signals helped revolutionize long-distance communication.
Fast forward 176 years and you’re likely to be reading this on a tab, in a future Morse couldn’t possibly have predicted. Our long-distance signals pass through the air. They carry photos and videos. These days a toddler can navigate an iPhone, manipulating more bits of data than a telegraph operator encountered in a lifetime.
But letdown of our imagination goes both ways: not only to the future, but also to the past. How well can most people today imagine the world of the 1820s? Or even a version of their own lives, stripped of today’s communication methods?
Writer, Isabel Allende says that “People in earlier times, were no less sophisticated than we are. They were just as we are, with less technology. The biggest and most subtle failure of the imagination is not knowing what the future might or could be but rather not appreciating the vastness of the past that paved the way for today’s advancement.
In imagining the future, we suffer from a curse of ignorance. Morse couldn’t possibly have foreseen the precise course of technological innovation. But in imagining the past, we additionally face a curse of knowledge: This failure can make the experience of living in the past seem more impoverished than it was, because our familiar technology isn’t just absent, but missing.
This isn’t to contradict the creative thinkers of today— people with the creativity and daring to envisage how things could be different. Nor is it to disregard the bona fide advantages and pleasures modern-day technologies can offer.
But recognizing our limitations in imagining the past brings an imperative example in humility and in humanity: “They were just as we are, with less technology.”