“I’m all ears for this history lesson,” Ernie interjected, and now he did smile. It was at least one area where Ernie really did defer to him, and there was no sarcasm in his voice.
“Think about it,” John continued. “It is an unanswered question I find to be fascinating. Modern eyeglasses were being manufactured by glassmakers in Italy as early as the fourteenth century. They could even grind them for each individual’s needs. They used to be given as a symbol of achievement to scholars at universities of that time, since most of them had gone half-blind after years of studying manuscripts in dark rooms like this illuminated only by candlelight.
“Across three hundred or so years, lens grinders were making glasses, and the question is, how come not one of them, even by accident, one day held up one lens in front of another and had the ‘oh my God’ moment that the two lenses, one in front of the other, were a telescope?”
He fell silent and now smiled inwardly, the grief of a moment before pushed aside. It was almost like being back in the classroom again—and this time, even Paul and Becka were listening.
“Then some guy in Holland, can’t remember his name, actually does that and does go ‘Oh my God!’ He put the lenses into opposite ends of a leather tube. Thus the first telescope.”
The four were silent for a moment, and he wondered if they were caught up as he had always been with the fascination of this question of why three hundred years had passed when the tools were there literally on any lens maker’s bench.
“So you’re saying that that stuff for telescopes lay around for three hundred years and nobody thought to do it?” Forrest asked.
“For starters, yes.”
“I remember this Italian girl in the dorm across the commons from my room when I was in college; we had a telescope aimed at her window 24-7,” Ernie interjected. “You’d think one of those Italian glassmakers would have figured that out.”
John sighed. There was always someone in a class to blow away a teaching moment, and even Becka laughed, commenting that was exactly why every girl in Anderson Hall always kept her blinds down.
“You’re losing the point,” John finally interjected, a bit exasperated.
“Please continue,” Becka replied, though there was still a touch of a smile as she looked over at Paul.
“So this guy in Holland makes the first telescope, and—typical then and now—the government gets wind of it and tries to clamp down a security lid on the whole thing.”
“Why?” Paul asked.
“Military secret,” Forrest said, and John nodded. “In Afghanistan, we were under strictest orders to smash our night-vision gear if we ever thought we were going to be overrun. They had stuff they had captured from the Russians years earlier, but nowhere near as good as ours. He who sees first or sees farthest wins.”
“Exactly what happened,” John continued. “Holland was fighting a bitter, decades-long war with Spain—actually, the Hapsburg Empire—for their independence. A ten-power telescope at sea gave them a huge advantage, when from miles away you could tell if that ship on the horizon was friend or enemy, to run or to fight. But like with all weapon systems, the secret doesn’t remain secret for long, and soon the word was out.”
“Same as today,” Ernie said softly. “I still want to get my hands on the damn idiots who allowed North Korea and Iran to get the bomb.”
“So do we all.” John sighed, and again the thought… surely someone knew before they were hit. Surely someone knew it was coming.
He let the thought drop for now, for it most certainly would take him back to his melancholia of but minutes ago.
“Anyhow, to finish this little class,” he said, clearing his throat. “And this is the really interesting part. Galileo receives a circular letter, sort of like the trade journal of his day, from a friend describing this new invention. Being Italian, in Renaissance Italy, he goes to a lens maker and shows him the design, and he now has his own telescope to fool around with and then starts making his own. But here is the fascinating part. He actually plays around with it for some time until one night he points it at Jupiter.”
“Checking out the girl bathing in the river down the street until then,” Forrest interjects.
John just sighed and pressed on. “That night changed everything. He was the first to observe what we now call the Galileo moons and in doing so presented proof that the universe is not geocentric.”
The four just looked at him, and he could sense his old students were now prepared for and would politely endure his launching off on some professorial run of thirty minutes or more about just how fascinating this moment was.
But he stopped there, aware that they were standing in a cold, dank, mildew-laden basement, and if Makala found out that a young mother still recovering from giving birth to twins had been forced out of politeness to stay and listen, there’d be hell to pay. Besides, with all the rush of emotions this experience had triggered, he was suddenly very tired.
“The point is that apparently every computer in use on the day we were hit got fried. We go without electricity for over two years until you two”—he nodded gratefully to Becka and Paul—“bring us back at least to the late nineteenth century world. But then in all the rush and excitement that created, none of us actually thought to look at the old electronic tools stashed away and forgotten in places like this. So thank you, Paul and Becka, for this discovery; you two are our Galileos.”
He was pleased to see that his words had hit; both of them were smiling at each other, Paul’s arm slipping around Becka’s waist as he kissed her on the forehead.
A thought struck him.
“We lost our house in the fight with the Posse, but my mother-in-law, Jen, God rest her, was a regular pack rat. Beside the old cars, she hung on to everything. I remember when we moved in, there must have been half a dozen old cell phones in a desk drawer.”
“No good without the towers,” Ernie interjected authoritatively.
“I know, but just curious. We all used to joke how we could remember phone numbers from when we were kids, but once the cell phone craziness hit, and then the smartphones, one simply just said a name or tapped a screen and the number was there. We lamented all the photos lost, all the text messages that touched our hearts and were saved being lost. Just curious now—I’ll dig them out and bring them into the office tomorrow and see if they light up again.”
“No good in that,” Ernie replied, “other than nostalgia. The question really is what to do with this computer and any others we might get running again.”
“Go on,” John offered, for it was indeed the question that had hit him the moment the screen had flickered to life and he was staring at that damned grinning Pac-Man.
“Databases,” Ernie replied. “Lone computers, like this Apple IIe, are nothing but toys.”
John was silent, not leaping to the defense of an old friend of a machine that had enabled him to write a master’s thesis in near record time.
“It was linking them together. The Internet back in the mid-’90s that truly launched the revolution. A machine alone, okay, it’s entertaining, and kids can play that dang Pac-Man and Mario on it until the motherboard finally fries off, and the way this one is smelling, I don’t give it very long unless I take it apart and clean it. I’m thinking about databases—uplinks, for example. Those guys up in Bluemont, don’t tell me they don’t have systems up and running. I’ll assume the low-earth orbit sats got killed off when the war blew, but the ones up at geosynch? I’d give my left—”