Old-timers are a present from the past

AREADER once asked: “What’s all this nonsense in The Star about that 66-year-old Romanian woman becoming the world’s oldest mum? My mum’s 77. Beat that”.

Yeah. And my mum was 92. And her mum – who was like Hagar the Horrible though not as good-looking – was 99.

She was fierce and didn’t like us kids. Probably because we were planning to kill her.

Talking of age, The Star last week carried a report saying “the world’s oldest woman”, Jeralean Tally (116) of Detroit, had died. Okay, she was the world’s oldest woman at that time, but the world’s oldest woman of all time was Jeanne Calment (122) who died in Arles, in the south of France, in 1998, the oldest woman of all time. She had lived in three centuries.

She knew Vincent van Gogh remembering him as “dirty, untidy and disagreeable”.

She was born in 1875 and outlived her husband by 56 years, and their only child by 62 years.

About 10 years ago, The Star recorded the death of “128-year-old Ouma Miriam Manuels” of Coronationville, Joburg, who’d trekked from the Western Cape in the 1870s. Her birth date was never officially recorded so a record could not be claimed.

I have interviewed three or four centenarians, all in England, except the one I most vividly recall. She was Hester Lloyd and it was in Benoni in 1959.

Hester was mentally very sharp. She recalled her grandmother talking about her own grandmother who saw a witch burned alive in a square in Amsterdam and who lived about the time Captain Cooke discovered Australia. It was as if I suddenly had a direct line through to the early 1700s.

It occurred to me that if, each time a centenarian dies, another is born (which must happen all the time), it would need only 20 of them to link us back to the time of Christ and only 40 to when humans built the first permanent settlements.

And only 100 consecutive centenarians to go back to the end of the Northern Hemisphere’s Ice Age when mammoths and mastodons still lived and Neanderthal persons wandered over Europe looking for jobs. And about 120 to when the first humans crossed from Asia into the Americas.

Researchers believe there are people, now 50-ish, who will live to be 150.

Will they tazz around in cars made of chitin – that impact-proof substance that allows beetles to crash at full speed without damaging their casing?

Wise men avoid trying to predict what the world will be like, even 50 years from now. Look how wrong they were in the past.

Francois Marais in Hermanus has sent me some examples.

“The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.” – Admiral William Leahy, regarding America’s attempt to make an atom bomb.

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” – Popular Mechanics, 1949.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication… no value to us.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” – Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“Drill for oil … into the ground to find oil? You’re crazy!” – So said men to Edwin L Drake when enlisting drillers for oil in 1859.

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” – Charles H Duell, Commissioner, US Office of Patents, 1899.

“The super computer is technologically impossible.

“It would take all of Niagara Falls’ water to cool the heat generated.” – Professor of Electrical Engineering, New York University.