I’m going to take a break from all the forgotten peoples I’ve been highlighting for the past couple months. You see, the Olympics have begun, and these always tend to take me off task.  Like the dog spotting a squirrel, I’m suddenly watching about ten times more TV than I usually do, largely forgetting about other projects and activities.  I’m sure at least some of you can relate!

Yet far from being the “normal” sports fan—whatever that is—I find myself always drawn to sports which evolved directly from ancient combat.  You know the ones, throwing a javelin, shooting a bow, I love this stuff and can’t get enough.  Aside from the ever-popular marathon and old-school combatives like wrestling, these events come closest to the feel of the original Olympics.  We can always argue, those of you partial to skateboarding and golf, but this is where I’m at on spectating Olympic events … bearing in mind I’m a bit on the obsessive side when it comes to history and historical ties.

I bring this up only because its relevant in the most roundabout of ways.  I don’t think it will surprise most of you to know that I’m not exactly a collector of online memes.  I just don’t spend a lot of time surfing for meaningless content.  But folks in my office are, and a couple are really, REALLY good at it!  And they like to print and post these in the office.

One of them caught my attention this week.  Intended to be in line with the opening of the Olympics, it featured the picture above, a group of medieval archers, lifted from the Luttrell Psalter, thought to have been drafted in the mid-14th Century.  The caption above it, however, read “The Invention of Archery” followed by “I really wanna stab that guy, but he’s way over there.”  Now, okay, not for everyone, perhaps, but that made me laugh out loud.  And then, a few days later, it made me think.  Never a good thing, I know, but there you have it.

The Greek philosopher Plato gave us the basis for the modern proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  But its so true, isn’t it?  Hand weapons were great and all, but at a certain point you start looking for a way to slay your enemy—or dinner—without putting yourself at risk.  The simple, unrefined kernel of inspiration that led to the original development of ranged weaponry.  And yet we often overlook the amount of time and effort it probably took to come up with a suitable solution.  We look at bows and say “sure…tie some string to a bendy stick and shoot another stick…easy-peazy.” 

But how many types of wood did the original archer go through to find one with enough elasticity?  How many prototype bows snapped in half while trying to attach the string?  How many types of long, sinuous, stringy substances were tried before they found one that worked?  How many unworthy strings broke while drawing those early bows and how many test pilot archers were injured in that process?  And how long did it take to realize you had to stabilize your arrows with bird feathers to make them actually go where you aimed them?

These are things we simply take for granted when we read an ancient account or, frankly, when we watch Olympic athletes with their fiberglass, counter-balanced, ultra-accurate, recurve bows taking shots at paper targets for points.  Once upon a time, an awful lot went into the design of what would become—in Asia and Eastern Europe, at least—a truly ubiquitous weapon system.  When you really stop to think about it, its amazing.  All the more so when you remember they did it without Wikipedia or Google, without computers, without modern power tools or even electricity … and likely without a safe space in which to build, test, and perfect the design. 

Necessity—in this case the need to safely extend one’s killing reach across the hunting ground or battlefield—brought about a weapon system still in use today, in 2021.  This same phenomenon led to better shields, more armor, horse armor, cannon, guns, tanks, airplanes … the list goes on-and-on, for if humans are good at nothing else, we’re really good at arms races.  One weapon design leads to a better defensive tool to defeat it, which in turn leads to a more effective weapon to defeat that, and so on.  You see this in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and even today where improvements in anti-ballistic missile technology has led to non-ballistic missile trajectories and hypervelocity warheads. 

Necessity really is the mother of invention, and, if you take a quick look around the room or vehicle you’re in right now, recently-invented products should jump right out at you.  Things that didn’t exist—even notionally—when you were born.  I’m getting older, so it doesn’t take long at all for me to spot those items around me.  After all, even as I type this, I’m listening to The Scorpion King on Bose headphones connected magically to a desktop computer with more power than the room-sized machines that launched the Apollo missions to the Moon.  Where to even start, right? 

When I was a kid … there was no way to rewatch a movie unless you had it on reel-to-reel with a projector and screen.  Headphones—to the degree that they were available to regular people at all—had to be plugged in somewhere.  And computers … well … let’s just say that Atari’s Space Invaders blew our minds when it first came out in 1978.  And don’t even mention cell phones.  A phone call in the 70s was an exhausting exercise in dragging a plastic ring with holes in it around a dial face with printed numbers, then waiting hours (it seems now) for it to reset before entering the next number.  It was literally faster for me to run next door to my friend’s house than it was to call him!

But life, and technological progress, goes on leading to ever cooler stuff, forever making each generation’s childhood seem like the dark ages to their older selves, much less to their progeny.  What traumatic technology-based stories will our generation’s grand-children say to their grandkids?  Will they complain of the time when they actually had to touch a screen … with their finger?  Will they brag about how much time they wasted riding to soccer practice in a … perish the thought … gas-powered automobile?  Will they someday wax poetic about the loss of human interaction … when Facebook and Twitter were forced out of business by new platforms?

It’s funny to think about it in those terms, yet I’ve no doubt, had my Grandparents survived this long, they’d have laughed at me telling my stories to nieces and nephews.  And their reaction would be justified, wouldn’t it?  After all, they walked to school … ten miles … up-hill … both ways … barefoot … in ten feet of snow.

M. G. Haynes