Secrets Part 1

Found among the files.  Stuffed into the corners.  Crumpled and stained with coffee.  These pages hint at when and where our secrets began.  

The year is 1962.  Our world is waiting for something new, bulging at the seams.

It is the age of superpowers, a chess match between the United States and the Soviet Union.  In May of 1960 a US spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace broiling tensions.  The pilot is still in captivity.  Last year the Bay of Pigs invasion fell flat and embarrassed the newly elected President Kennedy.  As the construction of the Berlin Wall divided Germany, the Soviet Union sent the first man into orbit and claimed technological superiority. Neither side will budge. Today, the game involves the entire world without a checkmate in sight.  What is the next move?  Is there a game changer, a single swipe that guarantees success?

It is the age of commercialization.  AT & T launched Telstar, the world’s first communication satellite, and television has become king.  In the comfort of our living rooms we see what to buy to make life better.  Everything is for sale; it just takes the right pitch.

It is the Space Age.  The Boeing 707, launched 4 years ago, shrunk the world.  Britain and France promise to develop a supersonic passenger plane to cross the Atlantic in 3 hours.  Mariner II reached Venus and sent us the first signals from another planet.  The goal is for man to set foot on the moon that luminescent ball in the night sky.

There is another age, one that most people are less aware of.  It is the age of agriculture, or as we in the industry call it, the Green Revolution.  Food problems have haunted mankind since the beginning.  The food needs of growing populations were always met by expanding cultivated land.  Not 50 years ago the intellects of the world foresaw mass starvation.  But investments in scientific research have led to dramatic breakthroughs.

The story of English wheat is typical.  This ancient crossbreed of wild wheat and goat grass became the first mass scale agricultural product.  Farmed by hand and planted once a year it yielded a meager crop.  Over 10,000 years humans developed the plow, the seed drill, and rotation crops so that yields increased 4 fold. Today, new plant breeds, inorganic fertilizers, and modern pesticides have tripled that in 20 years. Today, industrial countries have eliminated the threat of starvation.

The world is on the verge of a new age; the Age of Tomorrow.  Let us project ahead to an age of prosperity in which technology ushers in an era of leisure.  With new textiles, new building materials, new colors, new flavor enhancements, new hair products, new fuels nothing is impossible.  Never before has humanity made such progress in understanding the world.  We stand on the edge of tomorrow.