Looking back on the future

When I was young, my parents would tell me of the hardships of their own childhoods. These were spent at the beginning of the last century in a world with no electricity, lights, cars, airplanes, radio, or television. Of course, in the way of children, I wasn´t impressed at the time. ??? Then, many years later, I helped choose the U.S. National Academy of Engineering list of engineering´s greatest accomplishments of the 20th century. My parents´ stories came back to me with new meaning. In choosing and ordering the list of achievements, we weighed arguments about how much each achievement had improved the quality of life. But beyond the details of any single achievement, I was simply proud of how dramatically we engineers had bettered the way people live.