Made In America - Bill Bryson [222]
By 1990 America’s sense of declining economic prowess generated a volume of disquiet that sometimes verged on the irrational. When a professor of economics at Yale polled his students as to which they would prefer, a situation in which America had 1 per cent economic growth while Japan experienced 1.5 per cent growth, or one in which America suffered a 1 per cent downturn but Japan’s fell by 1.5 per cent, the majority voted for the latter. They preferred America to be poorer if Japan were poorer still, rather than a situation in which both became more prosperous.
Years before America suffered the indignity of watching its industrial advantage eroded, it experienced a no less alarming blow to its technological prestige. On 26 August 1957 the nation was shaken to the core to learn that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite called Sputnik (meaning ‘fellow earth traveller’). Never mind that Sputnik was only about the size of a beach ball and that it couldn’t do anything except reflect light. It was the first earthbound object hurled into space. Editorial writers, in a frenzy of anxiety, searched for a scapegoat and mostly blamed the education system (a plaint that would be continually refined and applied to other perceived national failings ever after). Four months later America rushed to meet the challenge with the launch of its own Vanguard satellite.23 Unfortunately the satellite rose only a few feet off the launchpad, tipped over and burst into flames. It became known, almost inevitably, as the Kaputnik. A little over three years later, America suffered further humiliation when the Soviets launched a spaceship, Vostok, bearing the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, which made a single orbit of Earth and returned safely. A week later, Cuban exiles, with American backing, launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and were routed. Never had America’s stock sunk so low in the world.
The country’s response was not entirely unlike that of the Yale economics students mentioned above. Without any idea of what the payback might be other than in glory, the country embarked on the most expensive scientific enterprise ever undertaken on the planet with the single ultimate goal of landing a man on the moon before the Soviet Union did. On 20 July 1969 the goal was achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped from his Apollo 11 spacecraft and became the first person to walk on the moon. America was back on top.
The heady first decade of the space programme created, or significantly rejuvenated, a clutch of words, among them reentry, lift-off, blast-off, mission control, A-OK, thrust, launchpad, orbit, gantry, glitch (first recorded outside a Yiddish context when spoken by John Glenn in 1966), and astronaut. What is perhaps most interesting is how many space terms predate the space age, thanks for the most part to the world’s abiding love for science fiction. Among the words that took flight long before any space traveller did we find astronaut (1880), space ship (1894), space suit (1924), rocket ship (1928), star ship (1934), space station (1936), blast-off (1937) and spaceman (1942).24
The space race did have many technological spinoffs, not least in the development of communications satellites and even more particularly in the advance of computing. So universal have computers become in offices, banks, stores and homes that it is easy to forget just what a recent development they are. Though the word was coined