One way to look at history is view inventions, and their impacts. A part of this invention thing would be a whole chaper (or twenty) on transportation.
Apparently somebody invented the wheel about ten minutes after we first thought of the opposable thumb and the war club. Wheels make sense. They let us carry stuff a lot more easily. Consider, there are only so many ways to handle things if you have a lot of crap that you have to get from one place to another. You can drag it. You can push it. You can pick it up and carry it. You can con your family members, neighbors, and friends to do the dirty work for you. Eventually you get tired of doing all of these things, and you tend to run out of family, neighbors, and friends.
“Oh oh! Here comes Fred. Quick, look busy! He’ll want us to help him move that dinotherium carcass down to the dump.”
But once you and the other primatives invent the wheel, and the wheeled cart, things get a lot easier. And, whether you intended it or not, you invented transportation at the same time.
It seems to me that the history of transportation divides into two different camps of inventors.
The Efficiency Camp: “We can do this a lot more easily.”
The 4th Grade Boys Camp: “Let’s make a big noise so everyone will look at us!”
Over the many years of mankind’s struggle with invention, I am convinced, psychotropic drugs have played a role’. Also, the lines between the two “camps” sometimes blur. (How else does one explain downhill racing?)
When I was a kid, there seemed to be a dichotomy between the two camps. One group of kids wanted to ride faster and lighter bicycles, to go farther and do it with more speed. The other group clipped playing cards to their bikes to rattle in the spokes.
Cars come equipped with horns. Supposedly these are warning devices, and are included for safety purposes. In fact, horns are on cars because some joker wanted to make them louder, and they remain on cars so that ignoramuses can blast them at cyclists.
The bicycle was clearly invented by the Efficiency Camp people. Explosives must have been invented by the 4th Graders.
“Loud Pipes save lives!” Some (not all) motorcyclists proclaim this with a straight face. It doesn’t matter that a bit of thoughtful reflection will show this statement to be absurd. In reality, these folks are clearly in the 4th Grade camp. (They need really loud pipes on their motorcycles, and blast their throttles as they pass cyclists? Really? Why?)
I do believe that the mentality behind loud exhausts, on motorcycles, cars, or trucks is truly traceable to the 4th grade. Remember when some boys in the 4th would seem to compete to see who could make the most obnoxious, and loudest of noises? Belches and farts seemed to be especially favorite subjects for those kids. The loud exhaust phenomena seems to be a mechanical extension of the pastime. They seem to be saying, “Let’s see who can make the loudest mechanical fart!”
The very first motorcycles were little more than early gasoline engines, kludged into the frames of bicycles.
Boom boxes, and super loud car stereos clearly fall into the same category. It’s not enough for the perpetrator to ruin his own hearing. (That could be done just as effectively with earbuds or headsets. No. They feel a bounden duty to generate as much noise as possible.
Why in blazes does it have to be so freakin’ LOUD! What’s wrong with quiet?
I love going to the high country. The silence is awe-inspiring. More and more, I especially like doing this in the Winter. The peace is much less likely to be shattered by a troop of two wheeled monkeys, astride their chromed up noise makers.
As more and more humans move into the same spaces, the noise problem increases. How are we to deal with this? If it is true that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” then are the loudest to be the only ones accommodated? Must we, who ride quietly and with little protection be bullied aside by the mechanical loudmouths?
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