The reward a Texas couple found in a bottle from 1962

While walking on the Gulf Shore near Corpus Christi, Jim and Candy Duke found an unusual bottle. It contained a note explaining that the bottle had been released in 1962 by scientists studying the role of water currents on the movement of shrimp.

Here’s the good news: if the person finding the bottle completed and mailed the enclosed postcard, they would receive “a fifty cent reward.”

The current lab director offered to pay the Dukes as promised, though it would cost the agency fifty-five cents for a stamp and three dollars to print the check.

What was the most powerful computer in 1962?

I’ve been thinking about some of the changes to our culture since 1962.

Technological advances are an obvious example. In 1962, the most powerful computer in the world was the Ferranti Atlas. It filled a room, took six months to assemble, and was difficult to keep running for ten minutes at a time.

Technology has revolutionized our lives, but its advances are a double-edged sword: they have put mobile computing in our pockets but also fueled the plague of pornography and provided a platform for terrorist recruiting.

In 1962, the Civil Rights Act was still two years away. Governmental legislation soon advanced the biblical mandate to reject racism (cf. Galatians 3:28), but other legislation has overturned centuries of biblical morality regarding marriage, gender, and the sanctity of life.

The Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962 celebrated groundbreaking discoveries “concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” This work was foundational to genetic advances that are revolutionizing medicine today. However, these advances could also enable eugenic alterations that would redefine and threaten the future of our species.

In 1962, President Kennedy announced the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was a…