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I AM about to deliver the coup de grace to my chess program for the
first time. The program falls more than a little short of Deep Thought,
but for me this is an occasion.

My wife will be home shortly so I postpone the moment; not least because
her side of our main board has more notches in it than mine. A few more,
anyway.

She arrives and I have my moment. She is impressed and, I suspect, just
a little miffed.

I’m not a computer expert and am very impressed by the program as a
whole. I comment to my wife that it even flashes up ‘Checkmate – congratulations’.

Now my wife is, if anything, better lettered in her own field than I
am in mine. She replies quizzically ‘But its all on a silicon chip, isn’t
¾±³Ù?’

Well, yes it is, but she’s obviously not at all intrigued about how
it got there.

That same evening I demonstrated my latest technological triumph – a
home-made robotics set-up. Although very basic, it did involve infrared
transmission, pulse position modulation and a none-too-easy-to-justify number
of hours with an oscilloscope, soldering iron and so on.

Our son has lurked even longer in the groves of academe than either
of us. His response to the performance? ‘Is that all it does?’

It was these reactions that prompted me to write about one of my earliest
recollections. I was standing with my father at the kitchen table. On the
table, a crystal set and two pairs of headphones in a pudding basin. Prolonged
silences punctured by ‘shush’ from my father may or may not have produced
a voice from the pudding basin, I don’t recall. What I do remember, though,
is a deep sense of wonder that it might.

The crystal set and pudding basin were later to be replaced by a fretwork-fronted
box, and learning that there was not a little man in there (much less the
Henry Hall Orchestra) was by no means a disappointment. This revelation
served only to increase my sense of wonder to a level which led to half
a working lifetime in radio and electronics.

I hung up my white coat and bought a suit at about the time when William
Shockley and others were claiming to be getting gain out of semiconductors
(a likely story, I thought). That there turned out to be some truth in this
is no doubt one reason that my sense of wonder has survived for all these
years. Now retired and a tinkering radio amateur, it even now impresses
me that I can sit at home talking into a box of bits and be heard across
the world. That I know how and why it happens hasn’t taken any of the magic
away, none at all.

But come forward two generations. My grandson, a few months over two
years old, will pick up a remote control box, press a button and look at
the TV expecting something to happen. Predictably, something does happen
and he soon tires of it. He will find the calculator and, by accident, clock
up root two in a couple of milliseconds. Watching this, I wonder what it
would take to induce my cherished sense of wonder in those who are following
(and rapidly overtaking) me?

I’d agree that there’s every prospect of a rich, full life without a
sense of wonder but what bothers me is that nobody wants to know ‘how it’s
done’. If you think about it, its probably as well that people don’t ask.
Anyone interested (unwise?) enough to ask ‘how it’s done’ would probably
doze off half way through Ohm’s law, and where else might one start to explain?

I believe that the gulf between the providers of technology and those
who use it is widening at a pace matched only by the rate of progess in
the technology itself. My father would speak of various institutes where,
in late Victorian times, men and women would sit enthralled by lectures
on all aspects of science and technology. His collection of old documents
included a leaflet announcing ‘A Popular Discourse on the Wonders of Electricity
– Admission 3d’. The person who would organise such a lecture today would
be brave indeed – or in search of a tax loss.

Does it matter? I have an uneasy feeling that in the overall scheme
of things it doesn’t. I wish it did though.

John Dobie writes from Stourport in Worcestershire.