Flying

I hate flying. I don’t mean the, “Boy, isn’t jet lag a pain,” kind of hate. I truly, from the pit of my gut, hate flying. There’s just something unnatural about strapping a person to a tiny little seat in a big metal tube shaped way too much like a bullet, then launching them 20,000 feet into the air at 500 miles an hour. I hate flying, and by that I mean I’m scared to death of it.

A few years ago, I had to fly to a job interview at a small museum in a small remote city 1,554 miles from the comfort and security of my home. It took twelve hours, three different airplanes, and four takeoffs and landings. And the city was so small and so remote that the last leg of the trip required me to board a plane that had propellers. On the prior legs of the journey, I had barely grown to trust the jet enough to not grip the armrest like it was the only thing keeping me in the air. I couldn’t tolerate the idea of boarding a plane using propellers, a technology invented way before I was born.

On my rainy, bumpy, fright filled flight, I tried to calm my racing nerves by thinking of anything besides the airplane. Like cars, for example. But I realized, cars were invented only a decade or so before Kitty Hawk became the world’s first airline hub. Only five years later, Henry Ford brought cheap cars to the masses, and just a couple of decades after that, airplanes were busy replacing trains as the preferred mode of long distance travel.

See, a lot of seemingly new technology isn’t as new as we may think. Smart people simply take old technology and tweak, reconfigure, or improve upon it to make the next big thing. The modem in my computer borrowed heavily from Samuel Morse’s telegraph, the hard drive in my iPod owes its life to magnetic tape, and my Palm Pilot used to fill an entire room. But they aren’t really new inventions, and there were no “eureka” moments where something truly original sprang forth. Their inventors simply learned everything they could about the artifacts people once used and found a way to improve them.

Most of these improvements are great, but sometimes they leave a lot to be desired. Listening to the whir of the propellers on my airplane that day, I wish Orville and Wilbur hadn’t been so quick to improve travel. I would have been much calmer on a train.