New technology shapes the West

Technology is once again on the front pages of major American newspapers and, for the past two years, has been the most frequent topic of cover stories by our major national news weeklies. Reason: Fantastic increases in the power of microprocessors used in computers coupled with sharp reductions in the price of computing power are giving Americans access to all kinds of new products and services unimagined 10 years ago. At the same time, deregulation of the telecommunications and electric power industries is driving major changes in how we generate and distribute both energy and information.

One milestone for dating our current fascination with how technology impacts society is the April 29, 1991, issue of Business Week. That's the one with the memorable cover story about new electronic technologies, the one that showed a man's defiant hand clasping a complicated TV-VCR "zapper" with the title, "I Can't Work This ?#!!@%# Thing!" The story talked about VCRs, telephones, copiers and other poorly designed machines that were driving consumers crazy.

Today, the issue is infrastructure, as gridlock on the Internet is the subject of daily news stories. Users are getting bogged down and systems are getting clogged up because people are doing more and more on-line -- from browsing for information and transmitting real-time audio and video communications to making Internet phone calls and automatically gathering highly-focused news and information. Much of this is also uniquely tailored to the solitary interests and requests of a single individual -- a service now provided by on-line features of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

America's renewed interest in technology is of special importance to people living in the West. Reason: Technology has always played a large role in the history of the West. In fact, it's hard to talk about the development of the American West without talking about technology. The telegraph -- including Samuel Morse's system of dots and dashes to translate the alphabet -- was first demonstrated in 1844 by sending the message "What hath God wrought?" from Baltimore to Washington. Over the next 10 years Western Union and other infrastructure and service providers had strung more than 23,000 miles of line to the far-flung corners of the nation. The transcontinental railroad, linking the East with California in the 1860s, not only facilitated commerce between California and the East but also stimulated the settlement of the interior West.

Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper and John Deere's new kind of plow, made with strong steel and designed like the prow of a graceful clipper ship, combined to make it practical to farm the tough soils of the Great Plains and the Intermountain West. Before the reaper, it took 20 hours to harvest an acre of wheat. By 1895, when the McCormick reaper was fully perfected, harvesting an acre took less than an hour. Deere's plow made it possible to break and turn the rugged soils of the Western prairies and highlands. Together, these new technologies permitted large-scale farming with a few people in an environment where labor was scarce.

Today, new telecommunications technologies not only make the vastness of the West less daunting, they hold the promise of delivering the West from the tyranny of distance. The major danger: government policies that discourage private investments that are necessary to expand, upgrade and modernize the infrastructure and make the benefits of the modern version of the reaper and plow available to everyone, not just those in the West's densely-populated business districts.