PROLOGUE

What an age to have lived in!

My life has spanned most of the 20th Century--an era of spectacular technological advancement .A revolution in transport and communication occurred. There have been significant social changes, many of which were precipitated by two catastrophic world wars which caused mass destruction and took a tragic toll of human life.

At the time of my birth the motor car was still a novelty and mechanically unreliable; the first aeroplane had flown only fifteen years previously and then for only twelve seconds. The first scheduled commercial passenger flights began when I was still a teenager but not in New Zealand until just before World War II. No one envisaged jet propulsion enabling aircraft to be built large enough to carry more than 400 passengers around the world and supersonic flight was not even a dream.

Radio (wireless as it was then called) could transmit only Morse code signals. Public entertainment broadcasts began in my childhood and not in New Zealand until I was a teenager. Motion pictures were of poor quality, only in black and white and only silent. I was still a youth when television was invented and transmission did not begin in New Zealand until I was middle-aged and then only in black and white. It was mid-century before colour came to television and even later before live telecasts could be beamed around the world.

Computers were unknown. It was not until I had retired that the age of instant electronic communication and publishing revolutionized business operations and social contact.

  Only fiction writers envisaged man being launched into space, let alone landing on the moon, or spacecraft exploring Earth's planets. Now it is a common expectation that eventually outer space will be explored by man.

  Indeed an age to have lived in!

  But what of the future? Scientists say that 80 per cent of the systems, processes, services and products that today's five-year-olds will use as adults have not yet been thought of. And further ahead will man migrate to other planets in space?

  What an age my descendants will live in!