S P U T N I K P U M P K I N C A P E R
In 2007, The Great Pumpkin is SILVER!!!
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In modern times, Halloween has been a time of year when we mock our fears about injury, death and other horrors through playful diversion - and focus these efforts on the entertainment and reassurance of children. Certainly there have been enough things to fear in the past - not to mention the present. Among the former was the so-called Cold War between the greater West and East, led, respectively, by the United States of America and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. With this Cold War now receding into history, the Haralson County Historical Society has elected to feature it during this year's traditional Pumpkin Caper festival. All this is not to trivialize the terror of the war, nor disrespect the suffering of millions of people through it. But given the potential it held for destroying civilized life for longer than most anyone dare calculate, and the unprecedented suffering such would have inflicted, all can agree it is a bullet humanity happily dodged in the main. Surely this itself is worthy of festive celebration. During all of 2007, the Society looks back to 1957 - now exactly a half-century gone. In September, the arts and customs of that year in American life were the focus of the annual fall Fair on the Square in Buchanan. Now in October the Pumpkin Caper will take a light-hearted look at the cardinal event of 1957, a key turning-point of the dreaded Cold War itself. Few would disagree that this was the flight of the first artificial body in free-fall orbit around the earth, the satellite called Sputnik I, launched October 4, 1957 from Kazakhstan by the Soviet Union. It does not diminish the achievement of the scientists and engineers who made its flight possible to recognize it was also a great triumph of all humankind, a climax in hundreds of years of progress in the natural sciences, particularly chemistry and physics, which was the fruit of the era we call the Enlightenment. It was the magnificent dialog between theory and experiment among the seekers of all nations which allowed humanity to advance so far, so fast and might be imagined the most wonderful protracted international cooperation which history records.
Of course, at the time Sputnik I was launched, nearly all of us in
the United States looked upon it with great anxiety, if not terror.
Only a few short years had passed since the shooting war in Korea,
and the break between the Soviet Union and what we then called Red
China lay yet in the future. Would this new frontier of competition
bring us and all we love devastation from the heavens themselves?
Through October, the atrium of the Historic County Courthouse in
Buchanan will feature an exhibit exploring the flight of Sputnik
and its consequences. This includes a nearly life-size model of
this first spacecraft, and an audience-elicited audio demo which
reproduces the signal it sent back to earth to reports its
scientific observations - along with notice of the awesome
technological prowess of the power that launched it.
Indeed, since it is so costly to launch even small objects into orbit around the earth - requiring acceleration to speeds of 18,000 miles per hour or greater - the new importance of outer space in 1957 created great pressure to miniaturize electronics. The microelectronics revolution which flowered and now makes possible an endless variety of amazing consumer gadgets is its progeny. Today, US business spends about a quarter of its capital budget on information technology - and about ten billion microprocessors are manufactured annually for use in lands near and far. At the dawn of the 1960s, very young US school children were taught the following song to acquire an elementary knowledge of the new "Space Age":
Not too many years later, many of these "Sputnik babies" were instructed
in the New Math, which naive critics lampooned as impractical,
but which taught about set theory and non-decimal numeral systems,
critical to an understanding of elementary digital technology. While
widespread (if hardly universal) exposure of children at so young an age
may have been very ambitious, for whatever distraction it had on the
destinies of children who would later lead adult lives far from the
cutting-edge, it also had the effect of promoting the development of not a
few electronics engineers, computer programmers and other technicians in the
decades ahead. And the kids of today might even think it was dorky
that Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa didn't understand why Grandma
and Grandpa were taught what a binary digit, or bit, was! Duh!!!
During the Cold War itself, at least some people were mature enough to
laugh at the folly of humankind - and share their sense of humor even
with children. One consequence of the space-flight of Sputnik a
half-century ago in 1957 was a cult-classic cartoon series which
premiered two years later, generally known to US Baby Boomers - and many
of their descendents - as
Rocky and Bullwinkle. Its original 40-episode
story arc
was built around the international intrigue following from the
discovery of a new rocket fuel. (Recall that Rocky's formal name
was Rocket J. Squirrel.)
Rocky and Bullwinkle were the heroes of the cartoon series,
coming from a community on the US-Canadian border. Their nemeses were
Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale of Pottsylvania. But their Slavic
accents and the Russian literary allusions left no doubt among adults
for whom these latter two characters labored.
Here's to memory of mus and skvirl, dollink! And Sputnik, too. |
