Technology had been producing marvels in the twenty-five years before the start of the twentieth century. It is notable that a comprehensive list of innovations and inventions shows that almost all of them came from one of four countries—
the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—divided almost equally.9In preparation for a century of movement, the 1890s saw the intro- duction of the electric bicycle, underground electric railway, diesel engine, motorcycle, outboard engine, gasoline-powered truck, gearbox, motor barge, motor bus, electric bus, speedometer, taxi, and rigid airship, as well as many of the inventions that made possible airplanes and the mass production of auto- mobiles. In a scant few decades, these transportation inventions alone would change the world, for good and ill, to an extent that appeared to those living at the time to be unprecedented and transformational. This revolution in locomo- tion was arguably at least as far-reaching in its global effect as the computer rev- olution is today.
The 1890s also produced the aluminum saucepan, machine gun, premature baby incubator, vacuum flask, domestic electric fire, milking machine, X-rays, dial telephone, ice cream cone, aspirin, high-speed steel production, paper clip, hearing aid, and safety razor. These and countless other innovations trans- formed the domestic and working lives of almost everyone in the world. The transformation was faster and mainly benign in western European countries and North America, and was slower and often malign in the colonies and less eco- nomically advanced countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In these regions, it was the Western technological advantage (principally in locomotion, communications, and military technology) that made possible the subjugation
and exploitation of what we now call the Third World. We are still living with the fallout of that technological dominance used for amoral and racist ends.
Technology was beginning to exert a great influence on the material lives of Americans in 1901, but it was also preparing to exert a great influence over their interior lives.
Letter writing was very common at the turn of the century (and was just one indication of a higher level of applied literacy then than now). This high level of communication was made possible by three technological innovations—the mass-produced lead pencil (1890s), the fountain pen (first manufactured in 1884), and the mass production and wide avail- ability of inexpensive writing paper.10
An astonishing variety of printed serial publications was available to the reader of 1901. It is well known that large American cities had numer- ous morning and afternoon newspapers (many in languages other than English) and that there were also many weekly and monthly magazines.
It is less well known that equally large numbers of magazines and newspapers with a broad readership were published in small towns and rural areas. Though there were then as now, mutatis mutandis, scandal sheets and popular tabloids, the level of literacy needed to ingest the texts of most serial publications then was far higher than is required by their modern counterparts.
The age of mass photography was in full swing. Modern photography began in 1887, when George Eastman replaced glass photographic plates with celluloid—also a necessary precondition of moving pictures. He intro- duced the Brownie camera (“Pull the string, turn the key, press the button”) in 1888 and everyone could take pictures of his or her family, friends, surroundings, and vacations with no training or skill required.
In the course of time, the family photograph album replaced the family Bible and the packet of scented letters tied in purple ribbon as the fun- damental chronicle of individuals and their relatives.
America in 1901 was full of visual stimulation. Magazines were heavily illustrated and contained graphic advertisements. Cheap reproductions of artworks, battle scenes, portraits, and religious scenes hung in every parlor. Posters and placards decorated almost every public place. Post- cards, photographs, calendars, greeting cards, and many other graphic media were everywhere to be found. Stereoscopes and 3-D stereo cards were as common in living rooms as televisions are today. This abundance of visuality was made possible by the mass-production application of
new technologies. This abundance of visuality still exists and has been enhanced by the ubiquity of electronic images on television, in films, and on the Internet. In addition, the presence of sound in almost every public and private place adds another dimension of stimulation.
The first central telephone exchange was established in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut (in an office that also issued the first telephone directory). By 1901, long distance telephony was a well-established technology. In 1893, the Bell Company leased telephones to 260,000 customers (one for every 250 people in the United States).11 Here we have the beginnings of a telephone network that is today the greatest communications network the world has ever seen, far surpassing the Internet in its ubiquity and in its effect on human lives.12Nowadays, when calling someone in Australia or India is a commonplace act, it is hard to imagine the change that telephony wrought in the lives of people and in the doings of society.
In 1877 Thomas Edison demonstrated the first version of the phonograph.
Within a very few years, a subsidiary of the Edison Company installed
“nickel in the slot” phonographs in soda fountains and saloons, ending the careers of many saloon piano players. Emile Berliner developed the flat-disc phonograph “record” in 1896. These developments meant that for the first time in history, a permanent record of musical perfor- mances and human speech was possible, something that, when real- ized, revolutionized both historical studies and musicology as well as popular entertainment.
By the 1890s, three main kinds of high-quality printing—rotary letterpress, rotogravure, and metal plate lithography—were in common use.13 Their effects on the mass production of printed texts and images were profound and far-reaching.
Microfilms were used in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. They became a standard part of library economy without ever pleasing the great major- ity of library users or providing (as the more hyperactive modernizers of the 1950s thought) the ultimate answer to library space problems.
The 1890s also saw the appearance of the kinematograph camera and pro- jector and photographic typesetting (all the invention of the remarkable Englishman William Friese-Greene), the cylindrical cipher machine, telephoto lens, portable typewriter, film studio, language-teaching courses on wax cylinders, wireless telegraphy, ciné film show (the first movies), photogravure, “visible typewriter” (one on which the typist
could see what she was typing), cathode ray tube, pianola, loudspeaker, tape recorder, “cineorama” (which used ten projectors), and electric typewriter.14
In 1901 Reginald Fessenden designed the heterodyne receiver, a device that made radio possible.15 In June 1908, the British electrical pioneer Campbell Swinton published a letter in Nature that laid down “the basic principle of modern television.”16
These innovations, in Thomas Schlereth’s words, “stimulated what many historians regard as a ‘communications revolution.’”17He quotes Warren Suss- man: “Consciousness itself was altered. The very perception of time and space was radically changed.”18These words could be and are used by pundits and sages today concerning the cyberfuture. There are many such apocalyptic visions among the writings and speeches of our time, such as this proclamation of a new Renaissance:
[T]he theme really is Renaissance 2.0, as I call it. It has the concept that we are about to approach a new age of enlightenment or a new age of learning and knowledge. Because of the telecommunications developments that have occur- red recently, and this will, though it may sound presumptuous and a lot of hype, lead to a new age of civilization perhaps.19
This really is a bit over the top. When you think of the efflorescence of learn- ing, creativity, and civilization that occurred in the real Renaissance, such a statement verges on the simple-minded. Epochal comments of this type did not begin just 100 years ago—a Philadelphia newspaper proclaimed in 1844 that its
“Telegraphic News” section was “the annihilation of space.”20 Despite these dreams and fantasies, the fact is that almost every technology used in human communication today was present in at least embryonic form in the first year of the twentieth century. The computer is a possible, but not complete excep- tion—since the concept of the computer can clearly be seen in the writings and work of Charles Babbage (1791–1871) in the first half of the nineteenth century.21 The tremendous impact of the innovations of the late nineteenth century was at least comparable to what the radio, television, computer, and other recent innovations have done to communications and human life in the last twenty years. The point here is not to make cheap and easy points about the overblown nature of today’s forecasts, but to show that we belong to a contin- uum of achievement, that we must understand that continuum and our place in it, and that rational appraisal will serve us better than overheated rhetoric that lacks a factual or even plausible foundation.
The Americans of 1901 had a relatively low level of exposure to the diver- sions and distractions that absorb so much of our time today. This was partly due to fact that much infotainment technology had yet to be invented, but it was due far more to socioeconomic realities. The United States had made significant breaks with the traditional structures of European society but was far from a classless society. There was a relatively small minority of people with the time and money to pursue culture and frivolous distractions and entertainment. The vast mass of people had neither the money nor the time for such diversions, high or low. For them life was hard, whether in a big city, in mill towns, or in the country. Workdays began early and ended late, hence the time for both study and entertainment was limited. Technologically speaking, there was no close analogue to watching sports on fifty-inch television screens, surfing the Web, listening to Walkmen, using mobile phones and computer devices, playing video games, or many other technologically advanced recreations. Other diversions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have close ana- logues today—for example, the life of the modern shopping mall is not markedly different from the life of the town or village square a century ago. The consumerism and materialism that pervade life today were only in a fledgling state. The population was still mostly rural—though the great cities of America teemed with poor and huddled masses of immigrants—and life centered on small communities and neighborhoods, with three generations of the same family living in proximity or in the same dwelling. Far fewer people than now had access to education beyond the elementary level, and the proportion of people who were literate in the narrow sense of being able to read was far lower than it is today. However, if by “literacy” one means the ability to engage in, and the practice of, sustained reading of complex texts, it is very doubtful that we live in a more literate society today. On the other hand, standards of health and nutrition were at a far lower level than they are now, and life expectancy since then has increased greatly, due in large part to science and technology.
Our lives today are suffused with creature comforts beyond the dreams of even the wealthiest people of a century ago, and the amount of information potentially available to almost everyone today is also far greater now. It is even arguable that we possess more knowledge today than our ancestors of the late nineteenth century did, though we have to acknowledge that most of that new knowledge is scientific, technical, and medical—practical in intent and in its products. Do we really knowmore now about the meaning of life, the nature of humankind, and the mysteries of the human heart and soul? Are the literature and art of today superior to that of the beginning of the last century? In a world saturated with information and data, are we more knowledgeable or merely
more informed? What is the nature of human life today if, crammed with statis- tics and factoids, we know thousands of trees but have no knowledge of the infi- nite forest in which we, our ancestors, and our descendants live, whether we and they like it or not?