By Teresa A. Martin
After this First Friday breakfast ended, I stayed at Mass Maritime to go Out & About on a tour of the academy’s training ship, the Enterprise. Originally built as a cargo ship in 1967, this freighter features more stairs and passageways than a computer adventure game, or at least that’s how it feels to yours truly, a member of the directionally-challenged club. Which is my way of saying this is one big ship.
The former Cape Bon once carried payloads of bananas and coffee; today it is a training vessel, and is, appropriately, a place where past and future intersect. As I stood there on the ship’s bridge, watching the wind, rain, and fog across the canal and looking around at the various navigational tools, it hit me again – technology is really all about evolution.
Here we were on this huge hulking ship, a marvel of engineering really. I mean, it is tons of metal that stays afloat and reliably moves around the world. What a break through from small hollowed out logs, one of our tool-using ancestor’s first technological water transport creations.
And as we walked the narrow passageways, at one point we stopped and could peer into a six-story power plant, that provides the ships electricity and fresh water wherever it may roam.
After 40 years of change, this vessel isn’t obsolete – because adapting to change let the Cape Bon become the Enterprise, with a new mission and with new tools performing the same needed function.
This transition isn’t unique to the Enterprise. All around us are tools that evolved from previous tools. Despite what it sometimes feels like, there isn’t a revolution.
It’s been just about 60 years since the first functioning version of a ‘modern’ computer (ENIAC patent No. 3,120,606 was filed 26 June 1947). More than 150 years since Charles Babbage was exploring the concept . Heck, even the web is more than a decade old.
We’re exploring methods of power transport that were debated by Mr. Edison (he favored DC but the ease of use and greater safety of AC won the day) and seeing how they apply to new applications, like deploying DC to move power from far offshore deep water turbines to land-based consumers.
Sometimes it feels like technological change is whipping through our world at warp speed, but when you sit back for a moment and look, you quickly realize that the unfamiliar is really strikingly similar to what we know. It is almost always based on incremental changes to what has come before. We rarely jump from point A to point M. We usually move through lots of evolutionary stops along the way – and even when we reach M, A can often still be found in solid use.
Join me for a moment on the bridge of the Enterprise. Here are three large monitors that, when the vessel is underway, display real time data and charts tracking the location of every other vessel in the area. Big ships take miles, literally, to stop, so knowing every element on the watery board is pretty essential to seafaring safety. It was one example of the state of the art digital applications that support the international shipping industry. Pretty cool, right?
A short distance away are the control panels for various monitors and intra-ship communication systems, all designed to let the crew know what is going on and manage the pieces digitally. Would we work any other way?
But between these two sets of digital controls is a flared brass horn rising into the ceiling on a large tube. It was a funny old-fashioned thing – it was a speaking tube!
And it was a very useful piece of technology, reliable and in use today to communicate between two levels on this ship. State of art 1911? I don’t know, but it was certainly an innovation that met a need – and that continues to meet that need today. It's sort of quaint, but oddly useful too. It’s been joined by digital generations, but both the digital communication systems and the speaking tube are tools for solving the same problem.
Same is true for the paper charts and chart tables and chart drawers. They all exist in electronic form, as well as in a paper edition. The real-time chart and data tracking systems are powerful and seem sort of gee-whiz on the surface. But once again, they are evolutionary – drawing on a centuries-old science (“there be sea monsters here”) of mapping, charting, and wayfinding.
So the next time someone asks you to try on a new technology for size, or to tackle a new tool, take a step back and look at it again. Someplace underneath the digital delivery or the high-tech composite material is a speaking tube that just figured out a better way to evolve.
Become a Member
