118
At this writing (2021), the entire history of powered flight, from the Wright brothers to the Rosetta spacecraft landing on a comet, is still encompassed by a single lifetime. There is just one person left whose time on Earth embraces it all.
Orville Wright’s famous first flight at Kitty Hawk took place in December of 1903, 118 years ago, the year Kane Tanaka of Japan was born.
Only one or two people have ever lived longer than Tanaka. The next oldest person alive today is Lucile Randon of France, who is 117 and there are two 116 year olds alive, and one 115 year old. Only nine or ten people in all of history are believed to have lived to be older than 116.
The one person definitely known to have been older than Kane Tanaka was Sarah Knauss (1880–1999) of Hollywood PA who lived to the age of 119 years and 97 days.
It has long been claimed that Jeanne Calment (1875–1997) of France, lived to 122, but sadly, in recent years doubt has been credibly cast on the legitimacy of that claim. It hasn’t exactly been proven but Jeanne’s daughter’s death was recorded in 1934 and the theory is that it was actually Jeanne who died on that date. The skeptics believe that the daughter assumed her identity so that the family could avoid ruinous inheritance taxes. If that’s true, the real Jeanne would have been a mere child of sixty when she died in 1934 and the daughter would have been a respectable but hardly remarkable 99 years old when she died in 1997. One counter-argument is that it would have been extraordinarily difficult for a person in provincial France in the 1930’s to get away with assuming the identity of a person of substance. This is surely true, but it would not have been more extraordinary than the statistical freakishness of the longest and next longest human lifespans differing by three years.
Take your pick, either 119 or 122 is the most advanced age ever recorded, but at 118, Kane Tanaka of Japan is the oldest person alive today. When she dies, the age of powered flight will extend beyond human time.
The Era Her Life Embraced
Tanaka’s life has spanned the most densely packed century in history. In her own country, it was still the Meiji period, the era in which Japan aggressively Westernized, shedding feudal traditions and transforming its educational, economic, and military organization even as the ancient religious and social establishments jostled for power in the new order.
Two years after Tanaka and airplanes were born, Einstein had his “annus mirabilus,” his miracle year. In 1905, he published three of the most revolutionary scientific papers in history. He explained the quantum nature of light, demonstrated the physical existence of atoms by explaining and giving a mathematical model for Brownian motion, and outlined what is perhaps the most famous theory in all of science, and The Theory of Special Relativity, which related space and time mathematically. (The Theory of General Relativity, 10 years later, connected gravity to space-time.)
That life evolved was widely accepted by scientists at the time of Tanaka’s birth but it was not yet at all clear that the underlying mechanism was Darwin’s principle of natural selection. Today, the idea of natural selection has an importance in biology rivaling that of Newton’s Laws in physics, yet 118 years ago, competing theories of saltation, orthogenisis, neo-Lamarkism, and various flavors of theistic evolution were all plausible candidates. Tanaka was married with children by the time science came to a consensus on what is arguably the most important principle in all of biology.
When Tanaka was born there were still more sailing ships than steamships. The largest sailing ship ever built, the German freighter Preussen, was launched in 1902, just before her birth. The Preussen sailed between Hamburg and Chile hauling nitrates and was a commercial success until it was accidentally rammed by another ship and sunk in 1910.
Cars didn’t displace horses in the city streets until around the time of the first World War when Tanaka was a teenager. When she was born, cars were still a novelty, made one at a time in workshops. The modern factory assembly line was still just a gleam in Henry Ford’s eye in 1903. The Ford Model-T, the first car for ordinary people, came out in 1912.
Radio was more than a generation away and television was undreamed-of when Tanaka was born. Movies barely existed — the first permanent theater for movies was built in Pittsburgh in 1905 when she was a toddler but movies were remained a novelty rather than an art form for some years. She was 24 when the first talkie (The Jazz Singer, 1927) came out.
People who are inclined to feel that slavery and its aftermath are ancient history should consider that when Tanaka was born, about half of living African Americans had been born slaves, which implies that great majority of African Americans were either former slaves or children of former slaves. It wasn’t all that long ago.
The last armed conflicts between the US Army and the Indians ended when Tanaka was a young woman. European cavalry was still charging the enemy with sword and lance when she was almost 40.
In art, nearly everything since Impressionism came and went since Tanaka was born. Some early Modernism predates her, but Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Expressionism, De Stijl, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism, Social Realism, Pop, Fluxus, Op-art, Neo-Expressionism, Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Color-field painting, Photo Realism, and Post Modernism (to give a partial list) are all younger than she.
Domestic electric power, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, cars, trucks, highways, air travel and freight, air war, nuclear weapons and power, broadcast radio, television, plastics, most medicine, the vast majority of chemistry, rockets and space flight, satellites, GPS, computers, telephones with dials, and cell phones are all younger than Kane Tanaka.
Harvesting machines existed when Tanaka was young but they were powered by huge teams of horse or mules and were not in general use. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia when Tanaka was 14 years old, the sickle they displayed on the new Russian flag wasn’t nostalgia — that’s how all wheat was harvested in Russia until the Soviets mechanized agriculture starting in the 1930’s. Many reading this won’t be old enough to remember when the Soviet Union fell in 1991; Tanaka was 88 years old at the time.
Tanaka’s lifetime has been both an age of miracles and the epoch in which technology devastated the planet like a slow-motion asteroid strike.
We’ve run through an amazing proportion of the world’s resources in her lifetime. We’ve burned up the majority of the oil, found most of the world’s valuable metallic ores, gold and other precious metals, cut down much of the world’s forests, turned a large part of the world’s grassland into desert and begun an epochal mass extinction that can only accelerate as global warming progresses.
Tanaka and her husband worked together for much of their life in a noodle store. Her husband’s employment was interrupted by his war service, but he survived the war and they continued to work there together until she retired at age 63. In middle age, the couple converted to Christianity under the influence of evangelical pastors stationed in Japan with the occupying forces. Tanaka visited her relatives in California and Colorado in the 1970’s and was widowed in 1993 at the age of 90 after 71 years of marriage.
Today, Kane Tanaka lives in a nursing home in Higashi-ku, Fukuoka and is reportedly in good health. She takes short walks in the hallway for exercise. None of her five children are still living but she has grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She practices traditional calligraphy and does math problems to stay sharp and has expressed a desire to live to be 120. If the pandemic and her health permit, she plans to carry the Olympic torch the last few feet in the opening ceremony for coming Olympics.
