You really couldn't make this up ...

[Talltim]

Miss Alice Grigg, of Belvedere in Kent, who died in 1970 aged about 107, was believed to be the last person in this country with a father born in the 18th century. Her father had been born in 1799, giving a span of 171 years.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letter-spanning-the-centuries-5615537.html

[kevinlms]

Why choose somewhere to live, next to a park?

 

https://www.9news.com.au/national/a-current-affair-keep-quiet-signs-in-manly-park-spark-outrage-aca/72c66e02-2134-420d-846f-5e1f54668b8e

[johnarcher]

3 hours ago, Colin_McLeod said:

 

Let me get my head round this. Alice Grigg died 171 years after her father was born. So she must have lived a long time and/or her father was old when she was born.

According to here (https://avaragado.org/tag/alice-grigg/)

she was born in 1863, so her father was c 64 when she was born, she lived to c107.  I'm almost tempted to re-animate my Ancestry membership and check it.

[PatB]

26 minutes ago, johnarcher said:

According to here (https://avaragado.org/tag/alice-grigg/)

she was born in 1863, so her father was c 64 when she was born, she lived to c107.  I'm almost tempted to re-animate my Ancestry membership and check it.

It's pretty remarkable to think that her father was born into an era when pretty much the highest technology was the long case clock, and before the first primitive steam locomotives started to lurch their way around colliery tramways, but she still lived to see a man set foot on the moon. The modern world sprang into being rather quickly, didn't it. 

[bimble]

3 hours ago, PatB said:

It's pretty remarkable to think that her father was born into an era when pretty much the highest technology was the long case clock, and before the first primitive steam locomotives started to lurch their way around colliery tramways, but she still lived to see a man set foot on the moon. The modern world sprang into being rather quickly, didn't it. 

 

It has been longer from the first spaceflight till now, than it was from the first airplane flight until the first spaceflight...

[Porkscratching]

2 hours ago, bimble said:

 

It has been longer from the first spaceflight till now, than it was from the first airplane flight until the first spaceflight...

"Progress" seems to have slowed down a bit then really..... Unless they're doing some time travel thing they're not telling us about..

[Fat Controller]

I must find out when my (great-great) Auntie Nellie was born; she was my great-grandmother's sister, and lived beyond 100. I remember visiting her in my early teenage years (between 1966 and 1970), at the new bungalow she'd had built for the benefit of her daughter, who was a mere stripling of 70 or so. I should add that this sort of life expectancy is only on the female side; on the male side, I'm already on borrowed time.

On the idea of technical advance;

In June, 1928, my mother (aged 6) was taken to see Amelia Earhart, who had landed in the Burry Estuary, in South-West Wales. This was the first crossing of the Atlantic by a female pilot.

At that time, mum used to attend Sunday School with a contemporary called Brian Trubshaw. Some 41 years later, as BAE's chief test pilot, he piloted the first flight of Concorde 2,

the British-built Concorde prototype.

[PatB]

1 hour ago, Porkscratching said:

"Progress" seems to have slowed down a bit then really..... Unless they're doing some time travel thing they're not telling us about..

Whilst there have been no (or few) big, spectacular events like the moon landing, I think technological progress is trundling along quite nicely at the moment. On a personal note, it's really not so very long ago that I remember being quite wowed, during my engineering degree by a) the department's 3D scanner, which worked by poking the scanned object repeatedly with an unbelievably delicate and expensive stylus, b) the possibility that we, as undergrads, might just get access to a magical machine which could turn a hand done drawing into something that could be inserted into a word processor document, and c) a big, cumbersome, expensive thingy that could be mounted on top of an overhead projector so your presentation could be enlivened by showing coloured computer images without having to muck about with printing them onto transparencies first, or drawing them in real time with pens that never worked. And this wasn't some distant, black and white Churchillian past; It was the mid-1990s. 

 

Not a comprehensive set of examples, I know, but they do serve to reinforce my suspicion that we're progressing pretty quickly technologically, but it's more diffuse and so is less easy to chart by big landmarks. On the space travel level, no there hasn't been another Apollo 11. OTOH, unmanned launches are so routine that, unless you're a space geek, you just never hear of them. Even manned launches and landings for ISS purposes only rate a mainstream mention if it's a slow news day and there's something noteworthy about it. 

[Reorte]

2 hours ago, Porkscratching said:

"Progress" seems to have slowed down a bit then really..... Unless they're doing some time travel thing they're not telling us about..

 

Wish it was slowing down, it seems to produce rather more changes I dislike than I like...

 

I agree with the post above, whilst there might not be some big events like Apollo most of the changes aren't that significant in themselves anyway but they add up. This has been the case since technological development picked up the pace during the Industrial Revolution. The result is that they're not noticeable at the time but when you stop and look back you can see that the world's become quite a different place to not really that long ago.

[Ozexpatriate]

3 hours ago, Porkscratching said:

"Progress" seems to have slowed down a bit then really..... Unless they're doing some time travel thing they're not telling us about..

Progress continues unabated in the electronics and communications sector.  We are also on the brink of some potentially revolutionary (and possibly scary) medical discoveries related to DNA.

 

In the 1980s it was unimaginable to have wirelessly downloadable video streaming in a hand-held, battery operated pocket size device. At that time, mapping the human DNA was inconceivable as a practical matter. The changes in information technology and electronic commerce have been truly radical.

 

There was a remarkable explosion of technology around the turn of the 20th century - telephony, electricity generation /  appliances / traction, internal combustion, antibiotics, "completion" of the periodic table and general relativity all happened within a couple of decades of each other, but looking back there is a lot of "perceived time compression" As we live our lives it feels like a longer time between events than it feels for past events.

 

The mid-20th century inventions were jet engines, nuclear fission/fusion, semiconductors, computing, and understanding DNA.

 

Right now progress is more evolutionary than revolutionary but I don't think the pace has really slowed down.

 

Edited August 9, 2019 by Ozexpatriate
Weird forum behaviour

[Porkscratching]

Totally,I take your points re the other stuff gents of course!....I was thinking more just along the lines of the aeronautics / space exploration malarkey, which you'd think by now would have gone far further into sci-fi, star trek territory, where as it's seemed to fizzle out a bit.....

Again there's stuff in the works I'm sure that they don't publicize....I've often thought that most of these UFO sightings are more likely to be classified experimental type things that folk have glimpsed, rather than Martians in flying saucers..

[Reorte]

36 minutes ago, Porkscratching said:

Totally,I take your points re the other stuff gents of course!....I was thinking more just along the lines of the aeronautics / space exploration malarkey, which you'd think by now would have gone far further into sci-fi, star trek territory, where as it's seemed to fizzle out a bit.....

 

Even there you'd be surprised. Yes, its not Star Trek but like Scotty said "I cannae change the laws of physics!", which is still the big barrier, particularly in getting off the ground in the first place. The challenge is that it simply takes an awful lot of energy. Even so developments are happening in that area (look up the Sabre engine). And the amount of data you get back from a planetary mission is vast compared to the earlier ones. Look how much New Horizons picked up just from a quick flypast of Pluto (I also find it impressive that we're still getting useful data back from the Voyager craft).

 

Do wish that the aspect of "progress" which involves electronics insinuating themselves into everything would go away though.

Edited August 9, 2019 by Reorte

[johnarcher]

16 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

In June, 1928, my mother (aged 6) was taken to see Amelia Earhart, who had landed in the Burry Estuary, in South-West Wales. This was the first crossing of the Atlantic by a female pilot.

 

Re such connections to the past, I know my father (b 1894 in London) saw both Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and Queen Victoria's funeral procession.

[PatB]

59 minutes ago, johnarcher said:

Re such connections to the past, I know my father (b 1894 in London) saw both Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and Queen Victoria's funeral procession.

Wouldn't want to get those two confused ;-).

[Ozexpatriate]

9 hours ago, Porkscratching said:

I was thinking more just along the lines of the aeronautics / space exploration malarkey, which you'd think by now would have gone far further into sci-fi, star trek territory, where as it's seemed to fizzle out a bit.....

Human exploration of interplanetary space is stupendously expensive. If not for the cold war, Project Apollo would not have happened. Until July 1969, a majority of US citizens did not support the space program. Ironically, as soon as they did, the funding stopped.

 

It is also not clear how well humans can tolerate an environment with higher levels of cosmic radiation for extended periods. The Scott and Mark Kelly twins experiment is an important step forward. 

 

Balancing spacecraft mass and human survivability is a big question for all aspects of mission mode design. It is what makes robotic exploration so attractive.

[Porkscratching]

Reminds me of the old thing about Van Allen radiation belts not being survivable.... one of the arguments for ''they never went to the moon'' theory..