6:30 a.m. and everybody's smiling at TYSTW Day
. . . . . . .
Contacts:
Rebecca Ullrich, (raullri@sandia.gov) Corporate Historian
Laura Martinez,
(martini@sandia.gov)
Web Page Maintenance
. . . . . . .
Corporate Archives and History had a table in the lobby of the TTC for the annual Take Your Sons to Work Day on October 7, 2003. Like the Retiree Picnic and Take Our Daughters to Work Day, this event is a lot of fun for program staff. Myra O'Canna and Rebecca Ullrich staffed the table this year, handing out Sandia history fact sheets and answering questions about Sandia's past while the boys and their escorts perused a small exhibit on Sandia's historians as detectives and a much larger exhibit on Sandia's role in the U.S. Readiness Program, as well as various program publications.
Inspired by a Sandia Bulletin (now the Lab News) article from 1952 in which employees were asked, "What would you most like to see developed in the next 50 years?" this year's activity at the table included handing out slips of paper asking the boys that very question. The boys seemed engaged in the exercise and offered rapid-fire responses as they imagined how old they would be and what the world would be like in fifty years. We asked them to send the slips back to us at the mailstop provided. Unfortunately, the slips seem to have disappeared into the day's adventures and we didn't receive many replies. Our lesson learned is to ask people to provide their responses right at the table (and for us to write down any oral replies).
The many verbal responses and the few written replies indicated that these young men are fascinated by robotics and look forward to a future with robots integrated into the daily life of humans. But, they're not just thinking about robots — they are engaged with science and technology broadly. Here are the four written responses we received:
"I would like to see real robots in my home." (Dad adds: "He is thinking of robots like the Jetsons have.")
"I would like to see something that can enable you to talk to insects."
"Flying cars."
"I would most like to see a little robot that I could play with and would know math and could play games with me in 50 years."
1952 employee responses to a request to imagine the future. Billie Peterson might be pleased with modern word processing. No family helicopters for Mary Costello yet, though.