Redding School District

I want to tell you a story about stories.  Sometimes the stories we tell each other are more than just tales, entertainment, or narratives.  They are also vehicles for selling ideas and inspiring others across our society.  Many of the most advanced achievements of this modern era has its roots in stories.

Three hundred years ago Galileo Galilei learned of a Dutch invention that took two pieces of shaped glass in a long tube to extend human sight.  As he turned this new ability to see farther out towards the moon; he discovered something incredible.  In his published books in 1610 he revealed that the moon was, in fact, a world of high mountains and seas.  This prompted stories about traveling there. 

The first was written by the Bishop of Hereford Francis Godwin who wrote of a marooned explorer who invented the machine to harness the power of the local geese in order to go to the moon.  His story contained crazy ideas such as a sun-centered solar system and weightlessness as you moved away from the earth.    These ideas don’t seem insightful or very creative to us today but for the first time someone had the idea that a machine could take us to the moon rather than a dream or magic.  These ideas continued to build until the late seventeenth century when people went back to using magic and dreams as a way to get to the moon.   Why did they do that? It was at that time when Newton discovered the power of gravity and Hook and Boyle discovered that there was a vacuum in space.  These new discoveries left many authors without ideas to overcome these new truths.

Then the industrial revolution occurred and the steam engine was invented along with pressure vessels.   People started to think about how they could resist the vacuum in space.  It was Edgar Allan Poe who wrote the next great story of space flight.  He wrote about a sealed balloon carriage that is launched by dynamite and floats through space to the moon.   Interestingly enough he gives credit in the appendix to Godwin’s story from two-hundred years earlier.  Then came Jules Vern’s story From the Earth to the Moon in 1865.  The story outlines a spaceship that leaves Florida, with three people on board, and its journey takes three days.   Poe’s account is eerily similar to the actual Apollo flights that happened almost a hundred years later.  Many of the rocket scientists who helped make space flight a reality today,  give credit to these and other stories of impossible flights as their inspiration.  Decades of commitment and countless hours of labor were also involved to solve the problems of space flight. 

I tell you this in order to emphasize the power of the stories that we tell and how we use them.  These stories remind us of the cultural processes that drive change.   Ideas are most often first articulated in our stories.  This helps create a narrative for a different future which begins to propagate from mind to mind.  This process has been going on since the beginning of time.  Many people in history tried to use stories to stop the progress that others dreamt of.  While others found their passion or a gem of an idea that lead them to decades of commitment and countless hours of labor.  These stories can and do influence cultural and technological changes in the future.  We need to always realize this fact when we tell our stories.   We need to tell stories that plant seeds to advance cultural and technological change for the better.   If we think that stories we tell ourselves are fanciful or impossible then remember the story of the voyage to the moon.   It is a cultural and technological trip that took over three-hundred years to be realized.   Let’s tell the stories that people will be inspired by our ideas to make a difference for kids of the future.

Have a great weekend,

Rob