BARRISTER NG
“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.” This was the blatant submission to Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, about the automobile at its infancy. Another educated man, perhaps more versatile than the legal practitioner, gave that verdict when the dream by Henry Ford to expand his company was interpreted to him. As an administrator of repute and the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, he was introduced to the Ford Company and asked to invest in it. The Michigan bank chief must have also tried to convince Mr. Ford’s lawyer why he should not invest in what Henry Ford was parading up and down. The encounter was recorded by Sarah T Bushnell in her book, “The Truth About Henry Ford.”
Mr. Ford was in his own world, buried in his work and was only seeing his dream. He didn’t let the despoliation of his work by the wary bank president to blur his vision. He achieved all that has been widely written about him in the history of automobile technology by his own single-minded determination and ingenuity. Ford’s dream was like the story of the man who lived in a remote village. He would come once in a while. When he does and tells others what he saw in the city, the rural people will watch him in awe and disbelief. His stories of a fairy world would appear as fascinating as a small mountain of diamonds but they will still take him with incredulity. Technology has driven many of us to that realm.
The same incredulous gasp greeted Thomas Edison at the British House of Commons when he took his audacious incandescent lamp to show the parliamentarians in England. Edison was optimistic that the British and their claim to modernity would readily key into his new technology could do for their freezing cold winters, their bubbly society and indeed the human race. The electricity cum lighting technology was making waves in the United States of America (across the Atlantic) and Newton felt it would be nice to introduce the ground-breaking discovery to their senior brothers in Britain.
“Facts and Fallacies”, a book co-authored by Chris Morgan and David Langford, the House of Commons did not only dismiss Edison and his technology, they berated him for wasting their time with his utterly untenable technology. They described the incandescent lamp as “a new-fangled nonsense” which they maintained could only fascinate “our brothers across the Atlantic.” Poor Edison left with his tail between his legs. He was defeated and he hurriedly vamoosed with his equipment from the Commons he hitherto thought was populated by modern people. The world knows who was right.
It might also be an interesting digression to point out that in 1901, a publication called “The Youth’s Companion” in Boston Massachusetts did a story on the reception of automobiles in England and found that the English saw cars – at that time as “impracticable machines’’. The automobile was “a fad, and an extremely dirty, dusty, uncomfortable fad… a nuisance on the public ways.” Your personal reflection on these verdicts would bring this perception of your beautiful car into a proper perspective. That is the effect of time.
Sam Levenson’s second book, “In One Era and Out the Other’” is equally as hilarious as his first, “Everything But Money”. In the book, he shared his experiences and the wonderful effects of technology and modernity on his immediate society and on the man he had become. He was born around the time of babyhood of the refrigerator because he said they had none – only an icebox in their home, one which must not be opened when their parents were away. He was born and raised in New York of the 1920s and 1930s. He cheerily wrote about his attainment of middle class. It was time to leave the worries and poverty of his childhood days in the deep Brooklyn underbelly. He had been employed as an elementary school teacher! He called the chapter: “Look ma! I’m Middle Class!” Sam had wanted to take his mother too out of the slum and the troubles she faced bringing up the nine of them. He brought his mother to his new home but his mother will not stay. She always wanted to return to her old home, her comfort zone. Then, one day, Mama Levenson told Sam that she didn’t fancy modernity. It made her uncomfortable. Specifically, she told her son that their modern “kitchen looked like a hospital.”
Sam’s modern kitchen of the 1960s would be an archaic monument today in kitchenry. The equipment and appliances there back then would be distant relics in today’s world. Sam Levenson’s mother must have left him in confusion as to whether it was technology and modernity that failed him or his mother that refused to become a modern citizen. I think it will come anyway and we would never be ready enough.
Ford, Levenson are like today’s young people. Today’s young wonder how you were able to breathe without a mobile telephone handset, data and the Internet. They can only faintly imagine how you could live without 24 hours television and innumerable videos and games on the Internet. The world has gone so far from where we were 24 years ago that the people born between 1993 and 2003 are asking questions many elderly people cannot comfortably answer.
Some of the questions are being asked on the controversy surrounding the President Tinubu’s certificate saga. They wonder why that matter has lingered for 23 years and still sounds as fresh as it does.
24 years ago, there was no mobile telephone all around us as we have it today. Modern offices of the high and mighty of that time had Intercom. It was cumbersome, but it was the best we knew. There was no General System of Mobile (GSM) technology in Nigeria let alone the Internet. There was what those of us fresh from the university knew simply as cellular. Then came Thuraya, the one we thought would be the height of it. But all of these have faded and have been consumed by the glory of GSM. With those very expensive gadgets, there was no hope of cheap telephony. The Minister of Communication of that era, David Mark, told us that the telephone was not for the poor.
Now, even GSM itself is evolving so fast. Whole offices and jobs are now shrunk into palm-held devices. We didn’t know it would come to this. I don’t think President Tinubu too knew that it would come to this. We didn’t know that children born after Tinubu had been elected governor would openly question their fathers as well as Tinubu himself on his opaque past in obviously transparent sincerity. The modern children are seeing things differently and reason from the point of view of their gadgets. They connect while in their cozy ensconce and are hearing from djinns we ordinarily would not have known existed. They compare notes and learn fast in many diverse ways that sometimes confound us. They question our disposition which, to them, is like that exhibited by the Michigan bank chief, the British parliament and Sam Levenson’s mother. They see other societies and wonder why we are not amenable to change in Nigeria.
I answered with an inscription by Ed’s Rentals on its frontal awning. I saw it on the internet and I don’t know its source. It is a piece of advice that should form a kind of mission statement for the Nigerian electorate: “Diapers and politicians should be changed often, both for the same reason.”
