Ideas

One hundred years ago (1922), a Minnesota man named Ralph Samuelson went to a local lumberyard. Most people would have said that Samuelson found two ordinary eight-foot-long pine boards. But Samuelson had a more creative idea. He saw two water skis. Here’s the backstory on his invention of waterskiing.

Samuelson lived in Minnesota and wondered if you could ski on water the way you could on snow. At 18, he made his own skis and had his brother pull him behind his boat. He unsuccessfully tried snow skis and barrel staves before realizing that he needed something that covered more surface area on the water. That’s when Samuelson spotted two eight-foot-long, nine-inch-wide pine boards.

Using his mother’s wash boiler, he softened one end of each board, then clamped the tips with vises so they would curve upwards. He affixed leather straps to hold his feet in place and acquired 100 feet of window sash cord to use as a tow rope. Finally, he hired a blacksmith to make a small iron ring to serve as the rope’s handle.

Samuelson tried several different approaches. In most of his attempts, he started with his skis level with or below the water line; but by the time his brother got the boat going, Samuelson was sinking.

Finally, he tried raising the tips of the skis out of the water while he leaned back—and it worked. As his brother steered the boat, Samuelson cruised along behind him. To this day, this is still the position that water skiers assume. Samuelson began performing tricks on his skis and crowds as large as 1,000 came out to watch him.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Creativity; Persistence; Vision – Those who are truly successful often start with a dream and persist despite setbacks. Just because it has never been tried before, doesn’t mean it can’t work. 2) Skill; Spiritual Gifts; Talent – God gives different gifts to his people to use for the common good. Don’t neglect your gift, but use it to glorify God and to serve his people.

Wrongly applied, science itself can become a religion, and the scientific method a Bible. In But What If We're Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman addresses the possibility that the greatest certainties might one day be disproven. At one point, he sites previous "certainties" about dinosaurs as an example. They were once known to be cold-blooded like reptiles. But now it is a “fact” that they were warm-blooded like birds. Such reversals are a regular occurrence as the scientific community refines what is known. Klosterman explains how these changes affect how we feel about the new certainties:

Yet these kinds of continual reversals don’t impact the way we think about paleontology. Such a reversal doesn’t impact the way we think about anything. If any scientific concept changes five times in five decades, the perception is that we’re simply refining what we thought we knew before, and every iteration is just a “more correct” depiction of what was previously considered “totally correct.” In essence, we anchor our sense of objective reality in science itself—its laws and methods and sagacity … But what if we’re really wrong, about something really big?

Klosterman concludes by addressing the possibility that some of today’s scientific ideas might be proven false. How would it change the view of the universe? He said, “Philosophically, as a species, we are committed to this. In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.” But what if he's wrong?