I should clarify that even tonight, I am still trying to describe massively complex issues in simple terms in a short amount of time. Please bear with me.
My first lessons from Gary Olhoeft take us back a few billion years, before man-made laws or mobile phones, when this planet was a mass of gasses, water, dust and rock. After a buildup of charge, lightning began to strike. A bombardment of lightning storms led to nucleic and amino acids, the building blocks of life. Early plants made oxygen and paved the way for animals.
Plants and animals still function by electro-chemical signals. So do our brains and hearts. Even at rest, all cells have measurable voltage. In other words, without electromagnetic energy, none of us would be here.
The ancient Greeks knew how to generate electricity, but not how to store or transmit it. The Greeks also created a regulatory system for health that included the direction to First, do no harm.
Humans figured out how to store electrical energy around 1750. By 1880, we also knew how to transmit it over long distances. We created batteries, motors and electric lights and built things like refrigerators. We transitioned from visible, mechanical technologies powered by horse and human muscle, then steam and hydropower, to electromagnetic technologies, whose power is invisible.
By 2015, about 135 years after we began laying out an electric power grid, we have nearly saturated our environment with electrical and magnetic frequency fields and amplitudes that do not exist in nature. We've changed the Earth's electromagnetic environment more significantly than any time since humans showed up on the planet. Most of this change comes from our electric power grid and, more recently, from cell phones and Wi-Fi.
What education prepares us to live with these massive environmental changes? What regulation protects us?
I'd like to describe four generations of education and regulation around electronic technologies. The first generation starts in 1925, when Gary's father, Roy Olhoeft, was a teenager with saved money. Roy asked his father, Gary's grandfather, Joseph, to let him buy a car.
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