(Ithaca Unleashed.blogspot.com)
Reading about the recent Miami blackout brings to mind some 20th century history.
The first major blackout took place about 50 years ago, in New York City. Working for non-profit mathematicians' educational group I had just arrived from California and checked into my hotel room on a high floor when I looked out the window. Instead of the customary vast array city lights, there was nothing but blackness above, and car lights on the streets below.
What to do? I had read somewhere that water in the bathtub might help one survive a hotel fire, so with the flickering light of a match I made my way through the darkness to the bathroom and began filling up the tub. After a while, however, a knock on the door announced the arrival of a bellman who was leading the guests down the stairway with a flashlight. With the others I went down and made my way along the darkened streets some 15 blocks to a the house of a friend, where I was expected for dinner.
As I walked along, however, I recalled some features of my college education, about a decade earlier, at the University of Oklahoma. At the time, many of the students were prospective engineers, and there were a variety of separate engineering majors--Chemical, Mechanical, Civil, Electrical (Nuclear Engineering did not yet exist)--and there was an unspoken hierarchy of difficulty among these, with Electrical Engineering considered the most intellectually demanding.
With the Electrical Engineering curriculum there were two separate paths, Power or Communications. The former, of course, referred generally to the technicalities of the power companies that had been formed in the 19th century, descended from the original work by Thomas Edison and Nicholas Tesla. This was essentially a WASP industry, with few openings for minorities, especially Jews.
Communications, on the other hand, came later and was more modern, and newer elements of our society were prominent, such as the three Jewish founding giants of the radio and later television networks, Sarnoff, Paley, and Goldenson. These organizations, it must be recalled, were not only broadcasting entities, but also played significant roles in technological advances, such as the introduction of the LP record and color television.
Now, in my college days, many of the more ambitious WASP students did not choose any engineering major, but tended in the directions of finance, law, medicine, business. And the minorities who chose an electrical engineering path knew well that they had few advantageous career prospects inside the power companies, so they selected the communications area.
And what was the result? Decades and decades, in the 20th century, of revolutionary advances in "communications," while advances in handling our society's power needs have been few and far between.
Had the power companies not been so hidebound, so adverse to hiring and advancing minority engineers, not been so anti-semitic, perhaps we not have had the power blackouts and brownouts that have not become a feature of American life.
