Translated material
Why is Russia not the West
04-06-2014 15:23:00
The West is not an enemy. The West is not a friend. The West is not a geography, it is a warehouse of life and a system of relations that you need to study in order to understand how we will join this mighty, occupying centuries and continents process
Joseph Brahma, an Englishman who invented machines, castles and hydraulic presses all his life, in 1778 invented a watercrypet with a float valve. The century was unhurried, reflecting for another five years, Brahma came up with a screw tap crane. A few decades after Brama, the gray -bearded Lord Kelvin improved the crane, creating a mixer that allows a person not to torment himself alternately with icy water and boiling water, but to make water a pleasant temperature. And who will now say that this is an invention that allows millions of people from Tokyo to Lisbon and from Alaska to Australia to enjoy a soft warm shower daily - gave humanity less than the construction of pathos pyramids or heroic cosmos flights?
The first elevator on the steam engine began to raise people in America in 1850. It was a primitive platform that drove along the sleepers, but the motive and idea are important here. The mechanic, whose name disappeared from history, was obsessed with the thought that a person should not suffer, overcoming hundreds of steps. And if he has sore legs? In 1861, another Yankee, Elisha Grace Otis, patented an electric elevator and “catchers” - devices that prevent the elevator from falling into the mine when a rope break. Without elevators, not only skyscrapers, but all other modern houses, without the hard work of Elisha Otis and his cunning head, would be impossible without elevators, mortality in falling elevators would exceed mortality in air and car accidents.
The Moscow metro is fine. But what would it be without escalators that the American Charles Siber invented? 35 years before the opening of the Sokolniki metro station in Moscow, he launched the first moving step staircase at the 1900 Paris exhibition.
Elevators, escalators, water taps, faucets, showers, mixers, coffee makers, toasters, smartphones, flash drives, discs, computers, routers, microwaves, bread makers, phones - in the worldly hypermarket of all kinds of technology, created to make people comfortable, fast, efficient and pleasant - there is not a single one. apparatus created in Russia. All these things came from the west. Even the toothbrush came to us from there. For 200 years now, a shaft of convenient devices that help live devices, complex structures built into simple things, apparatuses for breathing, power, movement, communication go from the west through all spaces of the globe. Navigators more change the lives of people than 3 thousand lectures on geography. Without refrigerators and gas plates, civilization is impossible.
The first household serial refrigerator was released in 1927 in America by General Motors. The model was called Monitor-Top, working refrigerators of this brand are still sometimes sold on eBay. Gazprom, of course, is the national treasure, it operates with deposits and billions, large -diameter pipes for continents and storage facilities for peoples, but the first gas stove for a separate, specific, private person built in the United States in 1825 an unknown mechanic with a divorce key in his hand and a set of nuts in his pocket. James Sharp in England in 1834 was already selling gas stoves. He put the first in his house for his own wife. There was little left about James Sharpe in history, but it is known for sure that he suffered, knowing that his wife was tortured to make fire in the stove and wash his little fingers from coal. Who was the Prime Minister in England that year, we do not remember, the British empire fell apart and disappeared, and gas stoves with a monument to James Sharp and his love are in homes around the world and give people the convenience of life, warm food, hot tea.
The whole modern world was created by inventors-without them we would still run on foot to the 10th floor, twisted the handles of a meat grinder until frenzy, went to work with shovels in our hands and flint in his pocket. This fate has passed us, because the West - in other words, an amazing combination of theory and practice, philosophy and theology, ideals and money, democracy and technocracy - was able to create our world with self -defering refrigerators, intellectual washing machines and computers connected into the network. The life of the entire urban population of the Earth, including those who hates the West, was created by the West in its powerful creative movement to efficiency and comfort.
It doesn’t matter here who was the first to make this or that discovery, this is not about that. There were no less inventors in Russia than in the West, we had inventors even in the Gulag. It is important who managed to see in the set of schemes or in mathematical calculation a new reality of life, a business plan, a need, and a benefit for many people. The method of nuclear-magnetic resonance tomography patented in 1960 the Soviet scientist V.A. Ivanov, but a tomograph as a medical apparatus for general use, helping to treat and save people, created the Englishman Godfri Haunsfield from EMI in 1972. In Russia, it has long been not socialism, but capitalism, but in the sense of the inhumanity of the system and neglect of a person, this is the same thing: modern tomographs are still not produced in our country.
The world of modern computer communication was created by the West. It was created by the West from the first DOS to the last Windows, from mainframers the size of a room to smartphones that fit in a pocket. True, back in 1961, Soviet engineer Leonid Kuprinovich created a mobile phone and even patented it, but for the development of civilization this again did not matter. It is important not only the invention, the environment is important in which it does not disappear, the world that rewards the inventor is important, and does not turn it into a city crazy, wandering around the offices in search of money. Kuprinovich’s phone remained a toy of nomenclature and Lubyanka: the USSR did not accept technical progress, people did not get a new phone, did not change their lives. Whereas in the West the whole meaning of the development of mobile communications - from the first Motorola phones to the last Sony and HTC delights - was precisely to give it to everyone without restriction, everywhere. The same thing with copiers that the KGB kept by registering and under the castle, scanners, computers. Homemade computers IBM and Apple were created not for party -held -controlles and security, but for everyone. The inextricable connection of the idea and its implementation, technology and democracy is the West.
In Paradise, a man did not know a heavy, draining the brain and the soul of labor. The West in its practical, business manner is stubbornly selected for the lost paradise. The liberation of a person from daily, often painful home labor was carried out by not Confucian China, not India with its pantheon of 40 thousand gods and Buddha, not spiritual Russia - liberation was carried out by a pragmatic, a thousand times accused of spirituality of the West. Great Russian literature doused with tears over a small man; The West practical and busily helped him. This soulless West did everything so that a small man would get off the corns from his hands and time appeared for thought, feelings and leisure. In 1886, American Josephine Kokrain was tired of washing the dishes, she designed the dishwasher. The automatic washing machine that freed women from washing in the basin was launched into a series by American General Electric and Bendix Corporation in 1947. There are different opinions about who constructed the first kitchen combine, but in any case it was a man of the West: either the Frenchman Pierre Verden in the 60s of the last century, or the American Karl Sontheimer in the 70s.
The West has a giant factory that has been tirelessly working since the first industrial revolution. This amazing factory itself rebuilts itself in the process of work, changing from the era to the era, expanding, accommodating already where the West is not at all in geography. She either instilles in California, then masters Shanghai, but this is the same factory, which is stubbornly and tirelessly producing thousands and thousands of the most diverse mechanisms and devices that humanely free a person from unbearable labor, save his life, soften the burden of his duties and make his life easier, brighter, and more intense. We are a civilization of hot water, an elevator, electric light, a dishwasher and a computer thanks to the west. Zvorykin, Ipatiev, Sikorsky, Shcherbatskaya, Brin, born in Russia, realized their inventions in the West. Why not in Russia? Because Russia is not the West!
The West is not an enemy. The West is not a friend. The West is not a geography, this is a phenomenon. The West is a warehouse of life and a system of relations that need to be studied in order to understand how we will join this mighty, occupying centuries and continents. Just the English company OWNFON has started selling a mobile phone for invisible. This is a phone without a display, with a brail font on the buttons. Its case is printed on a 3D printer. You can talk as much as you like about the spirituality inherent in us, but the phone for the blind was created in the West. You can boil as much as you like in our special way, but the best prostheses for the disabled are created in the West. Everything necessary for life is created in the West. The whole modern world was created by the West. Japan has already become a West. South Korea became the West. Taiwan became the West. Most of Eastern Europe became the West. There was a revolution in Ukraine because Ukraine wants to be a West. The West is not a country or group of countries, the West is a direction of history.
Author: Alexey Polikovsky