Why
1957
Changed the world...
I
In April 1957 the BBC current-affairs
programme ‘Panorama’ aired a report about a
family in southern Switzerland harvesting
spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". We
may laugh at this now, but the BBC subsequently received
genuine calls from viewers asking how they could grow their
own tree. An entertaining hoax, but perhaps a sobering
demonstration of the lack of understanding that the general
public of that time had about the world around them. Later that
year however, everything was about to change forever.
Friday, 4 October 1957 began as a normal day. Autumn was
here, and it’s highly likely that it was raining, cold and miserable
here in the UK as we started our daily routines. An ordinary
Friday. But 5000km away in desert near Tyuratam in the
Kazakh Republic, something extraordinary was happening. A
Soviet Union rocket launched a 22-inch aluminium sphere with
four spring-loaded whip antennae trailing. This was Sputnik 1.
The Space Age had been born.
The Soviet’s announcement that evening changed the course of
the Cold War, and elicited a reaction of horror from around the
world. Orbiting Earth every 96 minutes, the satellite carried a
small radio beacon that sounded an alarm at regular intervals.
The US cold warriors suggested that this could be a means of
telemetry verifying exact locations on the earth's surface, and
that this was a way for the Soviets to obtain targeting
information for their ballistic missiles.
The Eisenhower administration acted quickly to restore
confidence at home and prestige abroad. As the first tangible
effort to counter the apparent Soviet leadership in space
technology, the White House announced that the United States
would test launch a Project Vanguard booster. Two months
later on 6 December 1957 the media was invited to witness the
launch in the hope that it could help restore public confidence,
but it was a disaster of the first order. During the ignition
sequence, the rocket rose briefly from the platform, shook, and
disintegrated in flames.
The United States’ humiliation was, however, short lived. A
month later on 4 January 1958, Sputnik 1 fell from orbit.
So why the history lesson? The relevance is this: without the
revolution that Sputnik had started, almost ALL of our
communications today would not work. Your iPhone would be a
paperweight, TV would probably be restricted to those four
dear old channels that some of us still recall and finding our
way would mean reading a map. Imagine that!
This leads us nicely on to the real subject of this article. Vehicle
telematics. Or tracking, as it’s often nicknamed. Often cited as
one of the most controversial solutions a business can
introduce into its infrastructure, and wrongly viewed as a
luxury, a complex data feed, favoured only by techno-fans and
salesmen in shiny suits. But the reality couldn’t be more
different. Once a company addresses the ‘change’ issue,
telematics really can transform a business for the better.
So, what can it do for you?
The issues that face fleet managers today are much the same as
they have always been: cost, safety and efficiency. However
the telematics systems currently on the market are more
helpful than ever in keeping expenses down, increasing
productivity, and maintaining the health and well-being of a
mobile work force. There is far more to modern telematics than
just knowing where your drivers are.
In my experience, drivers are unlikely to embrace the changes
associated with having telematics installed. They see it as a ‘big
brother’ scenario; nothing more. But this is about proactive
management and safeguarding of your people. How happy
would they be if you asked them to operate a two-ton piece of
machinery such as a press, unsupervised, in the knowledge that
a single mistake could result in a lost limb, or worse still, their
own death? They’d soon see why it’s firmly in their interests to
accept your decision and deal with the changes.
The benefits really do outweigh any reluctance to move
forward. Think about the uncertainty surrounding the launch of
Sputnik 1. It happened anyway, and it led to an amazing
evolution that impacted all of our lives.
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