After World War II, many aspects of life were better, for example because of the concentration of resources and desire to win in the war those military findings can create new ways to do things. In the war, the idea is to kill more people so they surrender, but after the war those advances can be used for peaceful purposes. During the war, the Germans engineers were far ahead of the Americans and Russians, this resulted both sides took as many Germans engineers as possible to their countries to work on rockets. These rockets were to be aimed at space – outer space and who arrived first besides bragging rights could control space. There was a long time between WW II and when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon but all the wonders and themes of technology to help man are wrapped up in the story. The story is written in a book called The Race – The Uncensored Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon by James Schefter, Doubleday, NY, 1999.

The book is a wonderful guide and story to how we arrived at where we are now – looking back decisions are made while innocent at the time lead to new ideas and the continual improvement. One idea was when a person is sent to space how involved should they be? the answer was without man being in control why go? Another idea was the miniaturization of the materials to save weight and space, this continues today. In the 1950’s and beyond computers and equipment were big, today they fit into your hand.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the Race was leading by Russia (the first satellites) and then President Kennedy said we will land on the moon in the early 1960’s with the Americans landing in 1969. This decade lead to great research and development and wonderful engineering problem solving with significant spinoffs to everyday life. Those spinoffs helped create companies that exist today for they had the foresight to do something with the learning. Dividend paying stocks are the profitable ones and although there is no great race today, companies still have to be conservative enough to keep paying dividends and liberal enough to look forward to future earnings.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.