The Swiss Family Robinson, the family was ship wrecked on an Island. Their boat was made of wood. Nowadays boats are made of metal and have radar or other tracking devices on board. Instead of leather masts we have giant motor propelled rudders and Jets.

Instead of Just transportation today boats are used for pleasure, or even marriages. They have boats with big swimming pools, dining areas, tennis courts and even the movie theaters on-board. Many years ago about only 30 people would go on a boat as a crew.Now boats get a crew of thousands of people.

In the book I read the son's and their father carried hunting guns. Those guns were called flintlocks, meaning they only sparked some gun powder to set them off. The ammunition for these guns was small steel pellets that were not terribly powerful. Flintlocks also took a long time to load. In the present-day, the world has made much better more powerful and efficient guns, like machine guns that will shoot hundreds of bullets one after another very quickly without having to reload. The shots are much more powerful too.

They also have pistols that shoot maybe 20 shots one after another but not as quickly as the machine guns. These pistols are very small (maybe six inches long) but much more powerful than a big long flintlock. Some pistols today even have a laser scope to pinpoint targets. Guns today that look a lot like flintlocks are maybe 100 times more powerful than they were. These guns now are called shotguns or rifles.

These guns can shoot sometimes at least three to four miles but from maybe one hundred yards away, a certain shotgun could put a hole right through a 4 in. Ice of plywood. A flintlock bullet, on the other hand would swerve ND maybe only go one hundred yards and bounce off of a piece of plywood from that distance. In this book the Robinsons picked seven feet Into the mountain with pick axes until they reached a huge beautiful cavern of salt crystals. They used pick axes of wooden handles and metal picks as shown In the picture below: Nowadays workers and construction crews use Jack hammers which are machines that look Like big pop-go sucks and the end goes up and down very quickly and very hard.The end looks like a chisel.

The power that It holds scrapes away the rock as If It there were crusty cheese. A Jack hammer looks something Like this: Construction crews also use sticks of dynamite to remove rock. First they drill holes into the rock that are at least COM feet deep. They do this with crane drills. Once this is done they place the TNT (or dynamite) into the holes and control them to large amounts of mountain sides for widening roads or highways.

The Robinson would only need one, two,or three sticks of dynamite if there were such a device in their era.The Swiss Family Robinson captured buffalo ,mules and ostriches for transportation. They tamed these animals to become useful forms of transportation. The animals would go to the left, to the right, or halt when commanded. They would also go faster or slower when needed. So for that period of time they were very useful.

Now you can carry cars over on boats and use them for riding in. Cars are faster, more powerful and they wont die in ten to fifteen years. Cars have been upgraded greatly in 50 years from the sass's but there was no such thing as automobiles 105 years ago.The a major disadvantage to cars is that they need fuel, but like the animals in this book, the mule's, the ostriches and the Buffalo needed food for survival.

This Emily would have used a car or truck to explore their tropical island much faster. Today there are also amphibious cars that will obviously go in water, so the Swiss Family Robinson could drive car right off of a bay into the other smaller island a short distance away from them. The family had to keep an area of land for the wild animals to hunt them down for their meals. They also had salt from the salt crystals to preserve their meat.Nowadays this family would be able to use an electric freezer to keep their food fresh. They may still hunt down animals but not every single night.

They might hunt once a month, and then freeze their food until the next month of hunting. Today, even if they did not have animals to hunt or a garden to tend, they could go too local supermarket and buy any kind of food that they want or need. When they come home with their frozen foods they put them in a freezer. Towards the middle of the book, a boy named Frizz stumbled upon a huge field of cotton! The mother was overjoyed because now she could make clothing.If Frizz had not found this field the family would have grown out of their old clothes and well..

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Oh know the rest. If the Robinsons lived in our age all they'd have to do is travel to a local clothing store, like File's, or Lord and Taylor, TX Max or maybe even Bob's Store to buy some clothing. This would be better than to go through all that trouble of spooling, and winding the cotton. Then knitting and dyeing it. The father of the family was making a bridge. He had to cut down a tree with an axe which took a day.

Then he took maybe an hour or two making planks of the long cylinder shaped logs. He also did this with an axe.After that was done he had to haul he wood to the site of the bridge with his mule's. Nowadays the father could use a chainsaw to cut down an enormous tree and only in minutes.

When that was done, he would use a pay loader to haul the wood to a certain area. Then he would order a wood company to load the wood to a lumber yard. The logs would be cut into a plank form in seconds each. The company would haul the now planks back to the fathers "certain area.

" From there, instead of mule's, he would use his front-end loader to I have realized after writing these pages how much the economy has improved....

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.... D taken a step backwards.

Meaning yes, we do have easier, faster, better and stronger ways to do things and it would have delighted a family like the Robinsons to have some of the tools we have now. Like faster guns, dynamite and more useful boats, and better forms of transportation. But the step backwards is that all these tools have made us lazier and dependent on machines. If you were on an island like the Robinsons were, and stranded with almost nothing, you wouldn't be able to Just take a walked-talkie and call 1,000 miles back to America.You wouldn't even have a walked-talkie that was still working. If you even carried one in your pocket in the first place.

Frankly, I think a lot of people today wood die in a month because they are so dependent on machines and tools. If you put a person from 1999 into a 1700 world most of the people would be saying to the person from 1999 to get off their heels and help. But of course the person from today would have a machine to do the work of the person from the sass's. Then the person from this present-day would set themselves back into their electrically adjustable bed.

One which a person room 300 years ago would have to sleep on a handcrafted straw and wood bed. So you get my point. I'm not complaining about today's machinery but I do think its presence and it's use has brought the world a step back in many respects and in one respect especially, and that is pollution. Pollution from all of these so-called helpful machines. Pollution is ruining the earth.

Pollution was almost non-existent 300 years ago when there were no machines.