We’ve come of age accepting a near-vertical technology curve. Social media records our lives. Devices monitor our steps and our heartbeats. A.I. algorithms predict where we’ll shop and what we’ll buy. But long ago there was a decade that introduced so much new technology, so much innovation, that our world then was reshaped as never before.
Between 1895 and 1905 we began to light up our cities, put the horse out to pasture, speak with friends far away, and see machines cavorting with the birds in the sky. We watched images dance across a screen and listened to a new type of music even when there were no musicians present. One startling event followed another.
Until the automobile, 95% of all the people who’d ever lived never traveled more than 50 miles from where they’d been born. And then, in 1895, a gasoline-powered automobile arrived on our streets. Suddenly, wondering what might be over the next hill was an attainable goal. It would be another 20 years before Henry Ford made cars affordable but stepping in horse ‘poop’ was no longer a given. Today more than one billion automobiles travel the world’s roads.
Thomas Edison organized innovation in a way no one had before. He developed electric lights and soon, cities everywhere began to replace gaslights with his new bulbs. It was slow and costly. By 1937, for example, New York City had only installed 37,000. Today more than 300,000 brighten the Great White Way and its suburbs.
Then he turned his attention to moving pictures, a new, slightly off-beat form of entertainment. People were intrigued. They’d gather in a darkened room and watch images of horses running, or girls dancing, all for a nickel. Hence, The Nickelodeon! In silence, actors feigned crying and laughing to depict the story and new heroes were born…Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and a cadre of others.
It was 1877 when Edison made the very first ‘talking machine.’ For a decade it was a curiosity. Then it began recording music by using a stylus cut into the material, first a cylinder, later a flat disc. The musicians might have gone home, but the music lingered, the ‘phonograph’ filling the air with sounds that thrilled the soul.
Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bell, another inventor, edged out several others working on a device that would allow people to talk to one another over long distances. In 1892, his patents secured, the first telephone service was inaugurated between New York and Chicago.
And, in 1903, on a cold, windy morning on a bluff in North Carolina, two Ohio brothers successfully lifted a cumbersome contraption off the ground for 12 seconds. Traveling just 108 feet, it was breath-taking. The Wright Brothers had overcome the earth’s gravity and man could now join the birds in sharing the majesty of the skies. Others followed! Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian, who had flown his airship around the Eiffel Tower in 1901put together his propellered plane by 1909. The Army, using a Glenn Curtiss designed plane, had its own squadron by 1908. Passenger flights began in 1914. Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart became our new heroes.
In spring 1906, the buildings of San Francisco crumbled from the unsettled ground beneath. Meanwhile, a new type of music was emerging from the brothels of New Orleans, Chicago, and Kansas City. It was called ragtime here, the blues there. It was called jungle music, the energy and syncopation of the Negro musicians who invented it, talents such as Sydney Bechet, Scott Joplin, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong. It was guaranteed to make your heartbeat faster as your fingers and toes strummed along. All of this came within a single lifetime. Edison, Bell, and the Wright Brothers are gone but the giants who built Silicon Valley are still there and man’s ability to conjure up new ways for us to live our lives continues to be a thrilling and endless journey. What will our children see in their lifetime? Let your imagination soar.
For more about this period and how it impacted men and women, white and black, read WINDS OF CHANGE by Carole Eglash-Kosoff, available on Amazon.