This is a photo of my grandfather, Will Jenkins. It was taken in 1909, when he was 13. He made the glider himself and took it to Cape Henry, abou

Asking the wrong questions

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2024-09-05 17:30:08

This is a photo of my grandfather, Will Jenkins. It was taken in 1909, when he was 13. He made the glider himself and took it to Cape Henry, about 17 miles by trolley from Norfolk, where his first flight took him eight feet, and his last that day took him 40 feet and broke one of his uprights. They made 13-year-olds differently then, I think.

He built the glider, incidentally, with a gift of $5 sent to him by an American Civil War veteran after a school essay he'd written about Robert E. Lee was published in the local paper. The war, after all, had ended only 44 years earlier.

In 1946, by which time he'd become a notable writer of science fiction, he published a story called 'A Logic named Joe', which described a global computer network with servers and terminals, that starts giving people the information that it thinks they ought to know as opposed to waiting for them to search for it - the Singularity, if you like, or maybe just Alexa. He also, as I recall, predicted reality TV somewhere.

And yet, despite predicting half of our world, as a father in the 1950s he could not imagine why his daughter - my mother - wanted to work.