Beyond All Barriers (segment) (sound)

Yes, I'm locating the call now. One moment, please. Hi. Hello. Hello sir, would you please have Mr. Cole call up at 230 in New York? Hello bonus. Will you ring me a number please? Today it is possible for people to communicate with one another almost anywhere on Earth. Worldwide communication is helping to make a better world by bringing to man increased knowledge and understanding. The air is filled with messages and images, ideas and information, transcending all the old barriers that used to separate people from one [Music] another. Heat. Heat. The fact that communication is a reality today is due in no small measure to the dream of one man, Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had many dreams. Like a handful of visionaries, he thought that man might actually fly. Getting off the ground at first took the form of huge kites. The biggest of all called signant was towed to sea for a good breeze and actually carried a man a loft. Then came the bell planes which took to the air a few years after the Wright brothers. Sometimes the ideas began as models like this little hydrooil boat. The big boat that resulted clocked over 70 m an hour way back in 1919. Not bad for a dreamer. But Bell's greatest invention dated 1876 was the telephone. Pondering the revolution in communication that he and others had started, Belle foresaw a day when it would be worldwide, reaching beyond the geographical barriers that separated people. And he felt that when that day came, communications would help to bring about a better understanding among people everywhere. The day is here. But what of Bell's dream? What is the value of communications to the people of the world? That value has been long in the making. Long before man, the air was filled with sounds. The sounds of communicating birds and reptiles, animals and insects. There were sounds for calling and coaching the young and serenades for mating time. To these earthly inhabitants, the ability to communicate was a matter of life and death. Our remotest ancestors undoubtedly talked to one another with sounds inherited from an animal world. But gradually a wonderful new dimension was added, a dimension of thought and ideas and memory and a desire to express things, who we are and what we did. Human communication became something unique, making possible society and civilization. And what a thing that was. Look at it here at Ankor, a monument to Buddhism in the jungle of Cambodia. Ankor is dead. The people are gone. The temples deserted. But it is not mute. The stones the people of Anchor carved still speak across the centuries, communicating an idea of who they were and how they [Music] lived. Faces in the jungle. Part of a priceless human heritage. A city in the clouds. Another part of that heritage. This is Machu Picchu in the Andes of Peru, the sacred city of the ancient Incor. No more impregnable fortress was ever conceived. [Music] so carefully fitted with the stones of Machu Picchu that they stand intact today as they stood centuries ago. More than anything else, Machu Picchu was a symbol of man's ability to overcome a forbidding environment. An ability that has been communicated from age to age down through the centuries. pyramids in the desert and in the tombs beneath them, the treasures of 4,000 years of Egyptian civilization. Egypt's greatest treasure was a collection of expressive symbols and pictures, the language of hieroglyphics. For here writing flowered, an enduring contribution to human communication. In the tombs of the pharaohs, the images abound. It was as though by telling the whole story of life, life itself could somehow be [Music] preserved. The story they told formed an enduring chronicle of this remarkable civilization, even though centuries ago its last days ended. But even as Egypt was fading, a new day was coming to a tiny piece of land across the Mediterranean, Greece, the Acropolis at Athens, the enduring monuments of Pericles. How much there was to commemorate here where the human mind was set free from the age-old shackles of tyranny and superstition. The names that unbounded. Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Escilis and more. The very stones seem to echo with their thoughts. For the many of whom each individual is but an ordinary person are still better judges than a single man. The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness, for that runs faster than death. Athens was and is an idea, a heritage of mind even more than marble. After Athens, man was free. Free for pilgrimages of the human mind that would seek out new meanings for life and new forms to communicate those [Music] meanings. One of these meanings is expressed in the cathedral at Chart. Every part a mirror of medieval life. And above the parts, one idea stands out. An idea of love and devotion. Inside the cathedral, the idea continues in the most beautiful stained glass the world has ever seen. The windows of shot are virtually one magnificently illustrated Bible, adding a new dimension of color and elegance to human communication. To express these things, the people of the village of Shot labored devotedly to erect the majestic spires that rise beyond a wheat field in France. Everywhere in the world, here in Guatemala, for instance, stand monuments that testify to the abiding desire of human beings to communicate. In the past, this meant [Music] incorre. But now, communication is worldwide. Thus, as people probe the past, deciphering its language and its meaning, all the knowledge and wisdom of previous civilizations can become available to everyone. Now that communications envelop the earth, the vast knowledge of the present can also belong to all men. It can, but it doesn't yet. As a look around the world [Music] reveals, nearly every traditional setting today bears the imprint of modern technology. Our world is a world of contrasts, the old and the new. The symbols of a new world are everywhere from New York to Hong Kong. This is no longer a civilization of just this valley or these planes. It has a new dimension. The industrial revolution has flowered, giving the world a potential that completely overshadows the power of all the laborers of Pharaoh. Such power is something quite new in the history of [Music] civilizations. Discoveries by scientists everywhere are changing our civilization almost daily. Because of science, it is now literally possible to make the ancient desert bloom so that every human being on Earth can have a decent life. This is quite possibly the most important fact and the most important problem of our time. For now, people everywhere know this even though it may not have come to pass in their village [Applause] yet. Because of science, it is today possible to explore the sunless depths of the sea. [Applause] [Music] It is also possible to probe the far reaches of outer space. [Music] New discoveries in communication occur continually by scientists like