Rockwell nodded. “But that’s the situation we’re in, and I wonder if it doesn’t extend even into the aircraft industry in a different form. Nobody in any kind of business wants to change his model as long as the old one sells. That’s the basic fact that everybody’s overlooking. And when a change is made it must be a minimum — not a maximum — change. Every engineering professor in the country seems determined to keep this a deep, dark secret.”
Gunderson snorted. “Wouldn’t it be nice if it really were that simple?” He turned to Montgomery. “I’m kind of sorry I got you to come up here with me, Jack. I really thought these guys had something. I guess maybe they still think they do. But they just don’t know what they’re bucking.”
“What are they — and we — bucking?”
“Ever hear of ‘steam-engine time’?”
“No. What’s that?”
“Some mystic named Fort thought up the term. It means that when a culture has reached a point when it’s time for the steam engine to be invented the steam engine is going to be invented. It doesn’t matter who’s alive to do the inventing, whether it’s Hero of Greece, or Tim Walt of England, or Joe Doakus of Pulaski — the steam engine is going to get invented by somebody. Conversely, if it’s not steam-engine time nobody under the sun is going to invent it no matter how smart he is.
“Others have put it a little more elegantly by saying that it is impossible for one to rise above his culture. That’s the thing we’re trying to buck — and we can’t do it.”
“If that were true, there would be nothing but stagnation. Somebody has to rise and draw the culture up with him.”
“No, no —” Gunderson looked almost angry. “Take mathematics for example. A mathematician does his building on the foundation that’s already there. Nobody in Pythagoras’ time was going to invent tensors or quaternions. The culture for it wasn’t there. Suppose Einstein had been born in a Polynesian tribe. Do you think he would have produced his work on Relativity in that culture?
“Uh-uh. And it doesn’t matter how smart we are or how much we get our brains polished up in the Mirror — we aren’t going to take the next steps we want to take until the culture is ready for them. That might be fifty years from now, for all we know. You can’t lick the principle of steam-engine time.”