Word: electronic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...noted that the inventor of one of the century's greatest machines was a man called Phil. Even more, he was actually born in a log cabin, rode to high school on horseback and, without benefit of a university degree (indeed, at age 14), conceived the idea of electronic television--the moment of inspiration coming, according to legend, while he was tilling a potato field back and forth with a horse-drawn harrow and realized that an electron beam could scan images the same way, line by line, just as you read a book. To cap it off, he spent...
...Utah, a community settled by his grandfather (in 1856) under instructions from Brigham Young himself. When Farnsworth was 12, his family moved to a ranch in Rigby, Idaho, which was four miles from the nearest high school, thus necessitating his daily horseback rides. Because he was intrigued with the electron and electricity, he persuaded his chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, to give him special instruction and to allow him to audit a senior course. You could read about great scientists from now until the 22nd century and not find another instance where one of them celebrates a high school teacher...
Lloyd would gladly leave the "savage" earthling at peace and return to his beloved Mars, but he must build an electron accelerator (which later on turns out to be a simple carburetor) to repair his damaged spacecraft. So the Martian, later dubbed "Uncle Martin," becomes O'Hara's roommate. Meanwhile, thinking that he has stumbled upon the story of the millennium, O'Hara schemes to film the Martian and broadcast on the evening news...
Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It's time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now we're just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time...
...then, that the leafy tranquillity of Sterling's well-appointed Austin, Texas, home is shattered only by his two-year-old daughter Laura's careening through the living room like a stray electron? (Dad prefers "like a misrouted Internet packet.") "I like starting with a set of initial conditions and just extrapolating," he says. In this case, the initial conditions came courtesy of Mother Russia, whose meltdown Sterling covered for Wired back in 1993. "I was watching a huge 20th century superpower fall apart at the seams," he says. Extrapolating from Moscow to the U.S. was a simple matter...