It’s a pity that it takes a war to do it, but that seems to be the way people are. British imperial greed long ago caused a Mr. John Harrison to fuse metallurgy, physics, and genius into the first marine chronometer, by means of which the captains of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy was able to find a not yet plundered island twice in succession. Before that Signor Tartaglia, under the necessity of battering down medieval walls sheltering medieval thugs for the benefit of Renaissance thugs with Renaissance cannon, stole sine, cosine, and tangent from the philosophers’ toy chest and gave them to the world for tools. You know it was war that put jigs and fixtures on our machine tools, which is to say mass production: muskets to sewing machines, washers, kitchenware, Grand Rapids furniture, and the American standard of living. And another put planes in the air. And another avalanched radar, atomic bombs, and the first crude spaceships on us. You knew, therefore, like everybody else, that the current war was going to bring space flight, particularly the bombardment satellite Yankee Doodle a-building in the Southwest somewhere on the Colorado plateau.
