[HN Gopher] 1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
___________________________________________________________________
1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
Author : purgator
Score : 127 points
Date : 2025-08-10 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.derekthompson.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.derekthompson.org)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the Wright Brothers were bicycle
| mechanics; which, I guess, was kind of a big deal, back then.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| They manufactured bicycles, then the apex of precision mass
| produced products, and they also had a quite scientific
| approach to the design of their aircraft, with wind tunnels,
| for example.
|
| They were also the first to understand that steering the
| airplane was best done by warping the airfoils. Now we do it
| with rudders and elevators and flaps, then they did the whole
| surface.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Nice! I never realized that they were working in the "hi
| tech" of the time.
|
| Their accomplishments make more sense to me now!
| ares623 wrote:
| Thankfully nothing horrible happened in the next 10 years or so
| cs702 wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Anyone with even a vague awareness of history is aware of the
| historical parallels.
|
| Let's hope saner heads will prevail in these times of rapid
| change.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Can be break the systems that keep leading us to the next
| such war. For example the lack of true representation for the
| people. The seige of governments by the rich and "elite".
| Stupid decisions made by people who kill their kids for a
| buck (referencing climate change). Dismantling of
| international conventions that were the result of people from
| a harder time saying "hold on... this is too fucked".
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| No doubt exacerbated by, and in turn promoting, neuroasthenia
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| I thought this bit was fascinating:
|
| > Blom begins with Stravinsky, whose famous orchestral work The
| Rite of Spring was inspired by ancient Russian dance rituals. A
| melange of old folk music and arresting dissonance, the piece's
| first performance in Paris 1913 triggered one of the most
| infamously violent reactions of any concert-hall audience in
| history. As Blom puts it bluntly, "all hell broke loose":
|
| > "During the first two minutes the public remained quiet,'
| Monteux [a musician] later recalled, "then there were boos and
| hissing from the upper circle, soon after from the stalls. People
| sitting next to one another began to hit one another on the head
| with fists and walking sticks, or whatever else they had to hand.
| Soon, their anger was turned against the dancers and especially
| against the orchestra... Everything to hand was thrown at them,
| but we continued playing. The chaos was complete when members of
| the audience turned on one another, on anyone supporting the
| other side. A heavily bejewelled lady was seen slapping her
| neighbour before storming off, while another one spat in her
| detractor's face. Fights broke out everywhere and challenges to
| duels were issued."
|
| There's something about the image of a concert hall full of rich,
| fancy people erupting in a melee that is just delightful
| andrewparker wrote:
| If this is your cup of tea, it's worth reading about the Astor
| Place riots over Shakespeare performances in NYC
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| I most certainly will, thank you for the suggestion!
| russellbeattie wrote:
| You know, I just listened to it [1] and I can see why there was
| such a strong visceral reaction to the piece! "Dissonant" is
| definitely the right description. It's almost painful to listen
| to, especially if you were expecting normal concert music. Is
| it enough to cause a riot? Maybe!
|
| 1) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EkwqPJZe8ms
| eszed wrote:
| > concert hall full of rich, fancy people
|
| Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right
| image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.
|
| Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a
| delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers
| coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.)
| Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone
| records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world -
| and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony
| concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
| eschulz wrote:
| I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed
| societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to
| this new development.
|
| "The Gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish
| the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial
| To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small pieces ! . . . I
| can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The
| town's so full of these confounded dials . . ." -- Plautus
| go_elmo wrote:
| Finally someone who understands me. Whatever becomes
| measurable, becomes controllable, which is the antidote to
| freedom, wildness, life (to some extent)..
| supportengineer wrote:
| I'm ethically torn whether to upvote this
| sdenton4 wrote:
| My favorite Samuel Delany story is about a woman in a village
| who invents writing, and teaches it to all the children. She
| makes a rule that you're never allowed to write down people's
| names, as it will inevitably lead to keeping records
| comparing people, and thus leading to strife...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Being able to have simplicity of working on a task until it
| is done when society didn't have these per hour scheduling
| concepts. I remember hearing this referenced when learning
| about Amish and Native American cultures. Essentially, this
| is what were doing. When it is finished, we move on to next.
| No arbitrary start/stop time because some hand on a dial is
| pointing at a certain number.
| verbify wrote:
| > some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new
| development
|
| Platus lived 254 - 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's
| a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he
| wrote it.
| eschulz wrote:
| Being invented doesn't mean that they became commonly used.
| Many ancient inventions took thousands of years to rollout
| and be adopted by the vast majority of humans.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Perhaps, but the quote also doesn't read to me like someone
| ranting about a _new_ invention, just one that he wished
| had never been invented. Just like I might find myself
| occasionally cursing whoever invented the idea of an office
| building, even though it predates me.
| verbify wrote:
| Sure, but is there anything in that quote that suggests
| it's a reaction to new technology rather than just a
| rumination on existing technology?
| xandrius wrote:
| Yep, they definitely could have bought it from Amazon.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational
| region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it
| would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of
| the coast.
|
| Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a
| massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would
| trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the
| Levant. The sea was a highway to them.
|
| Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did,
| and they knew how to make money by selling attractive
| goods.
| noosphr wrote:
| Electric cars were invented in 1881 a full 4 years before the
| first internal combustion car.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| Kinda interesting to ask what would have gone different if
| the infrastructure was in place to make electric cars 'good
| enough' as far as charging infrastructure.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I do believe that time keeping, computers, and other technology
| are overused and overly relied on. (There is also damaging
| other stuff due to these technology, which is another issue.
| There are other issues too; these are clearly not the only
| thing.) They have their uses, but should not be excessive at
| the expense of anything else. If they fail, then you won't do
| unless you know and have not destroyed the older possibility,
| and if they do not fail, then you may be trapped by them. You
| should not need to know what time it is to sit down to eat, or
| to wake up and to sleep, etc.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with
| horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you
| die. That's some serious societal whiplash.
|
| I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era
| of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
|
| _" You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a
| person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry
| around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid
| which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000
| volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin
| a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear
| of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air
| they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines
| all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it,
| the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"_
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their
| lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would
| envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.
| ben_w wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Here's one for you: There's a 10-15% chance, even barring
| radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see
| the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| How could you possible come up with 10-15%?
| ben_w wrote:
| Eyeballing a sigmoid curve for TRL development times:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
|
| There's several things that it depends on which are TRL
| 1-3, but are known to be at least theoretically possible.
| Based on how long it takes to get other things from TRL 1
| to working device, I think it's most likely to take longer
| than my current remaining life expectancy even to be even
| odds, but not by such a large margin as to be infinitesimal
| odds.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit, so the
| most likely version of this scenario is not beneficial/benign
| (e.g, grey goo scenario), so you need to factor in the chance
| that you'll be dissasembled before you see it happen to the
| moon.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit
|
| Not by itself. I basically agree with your broader point,
| of course, but on this particular detail, if someone's goal
| is to turn the moon into something like a Culture Orbital
| with the Earth at the centre*, the overall momentum of the
| system doesn't need to change.
|
| * Or the old barycentre at the centre. This is also a
| terrible idea, please don't do this. Apart from anything
| else, mistakes are inevitable and large chunks of moon/O
| will rain down on us.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| That will pale in comparison to how future generations view
| plastics.
|
| Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers
| constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts.
| That's basically what has happened with plastics.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Plastic isn't remotely as toxic as lead
| teamonkey wrote:
| Lead was used as a sweetener in food for hundreds of years
| marc_abonce wrote:
| Based on the title I thought that the article was going to
| include the Mexican Revolution, which also started in 1910.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| During the early industrial revolution people used to present
| themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant
| repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines)
| hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations
| which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having
| this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
| userbinator wrote:
| Something similar happened in more modern times with a cell
| tower, although it's over a decade ago now:
| https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-t...
| cobbzilla wrote:
| Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when
| it's quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5
| miles away. It wouldn't surprise me if the beam engine was
| louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter
| in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much
| though.
| alexpotato wrote:
| For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly
| changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0]
| highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).
|
| I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt
| so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
|
| - local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news"
| that arrived immediately
|
| - the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could
| communicate instantly around the world
|
| - financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of
| the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
|
| - there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and
| marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in
| particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
|
| I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the
| 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often
| just updated versions of old technologies.
|
| 0 - https://amzn.to/4frEGyC
|
| (NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to
| think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular
| example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders
| to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the
| same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank
| (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as
| if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized
| sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea
| that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For
| another example, look how every generation of teenagers,
| without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world
| to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how
| my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to
| get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that
| they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of
| things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I heard an anecdote recently where the kids asked mom what
| it was like when they were a kid. Mom collected the mobile
| devices and turned off the internet.
| villedespommes wrote:
| Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before
| that and one before that.
|
| 40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid
| to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw
| the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes
| and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small
| incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved
| millions of lives since then.
|
| All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more
| impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe
| incorrectly, my generation).
|
| One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught
| by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to
| revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
|
| To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but
| it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived
| through - and less qualitatively different than, for example,
| personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
|
| My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll.
| People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but
| to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio
| already had been playing for a decade.
| eszed wrote:
| That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites
| for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels
| between early-internet culture and the social practices of
| telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay
| "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long
| distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously
| socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately
| familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time.
| I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I
| wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience
| that milieu.
| dylan604 wrote:
| PBS did a special on how TV news came to dominance with
| coverage of the JFK assassination called "JFK: Breaking the
| News".
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/
|
| Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live
| coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
| basch wrote:
| Two other good books are
|
| The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in
| the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
|
| It's about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that
| trains moved cities closer together by making the distance
| between them shorter. They shrink the world.
|
| The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
|
| About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure
| labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any
| problem, to their detriment.
| mhalle wrote:
| You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which
| describes about how electricity and communication in the home
| changed society.
|
| For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the
| telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women
| directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-
| time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was
| so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social
| defenses for it.
|
| https://a.co/d/fnBimUx
| wrp wrote:
| The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an
| even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas,
| communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five
| deliveries per day.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I'm not anxious about rapid technological change.
|
| I care about the fact that technology is used to undermine
| democracy and destroy social cohesion.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Yeah but like 23 dudes can have more money than god, so this is
| a moral imperative.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was
| unnatural for people to move so quickly_
|
| Google says that horses can go up to 70 km/h (45mi/h). Did cars
| (and bicicles) go so fast then?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No one said it was a rational objection.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| That's basically a full out sprint for a relatively fast horse.
| Most can't sustain that for long and definitely not with a lot
| of load. Steam, gas, and diesel engines were and are capable of
| sustaining that for long durations with greater load, hence why
| it seems so jarring. Especially for large loads, even the
| earliest trucks were probably moving must faster than draft
| horses.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| In the book _The Count of Monte Cristo_ , one of the ways the
| eponymous Count flaunts his unfathomable wealth is by posting
| many horses to wait for him in advance all along the highways,
| allowing his carriage to travel all across France in a single
| night by continually changing to fresh horses. Even his wealthy
| rivals are astonished by this feat. So while it may have been
| technologically possible it would have been very expensive.
| perching_aix wrote:
| According to this [0] thread, typical car travel speeds were
| between 10 and 20 mph. They even mention specifics like:
|
| > in 1904 in NYC the limit was set to 12 mph inside of the city
| and 15 mph outside of it.
|
| With that 12 mph figure being a little under the average
| running speed of the record holder marathon runner (26.2 miles
| in 2 hours flat, so 13.1 mph).
|
| Now of course, most people are not record holding athletes, so
| sustaining these speeds on foot is not happening. But you can
| definitely at least keep up for the duration of a sprint. So no
| real need for a horse even, your own legs can make do.
|
| You can also sustain these speeds with a bicycle today, not
| sure about the bicycles of then.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Writeresearch/comments/hmy0h4/what_...
| derbOac wrote:
| The acceleration is evident in public health trends as well,
| especially in perinatal and childhood deaths and infectious
| disease.
|
| The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically
| speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it
| completely.
| elcritch wrote:
| I believe it'll take centuries before a new equilibrium is
| reached. There's likely a lot of challenges and strifes to come
| in this century alone.
| cgh wrote:
| Anyone interested in a fictional take on this period could
| consider Pynchon's "Against the Day", although it is no light
| challenge. It takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair
| and the years following WW1 and, appropriately, tells a
| sprawling, disorienting story that feels overwhelming at times.
| bgwalter wrote:
| In other news, radioactivity was embraced to the point that
| radium was used everywhere
| (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) and shoe stores were
| offering x-rays.
|
| Today, even the Internet's positive impact is wildly debated, the
| LLM copyright issues are wildly debated and no data exists for
| the long term impact of LLM usage on the reasoning faculties (if
| you tell me that the article was not posted to discredit LLM
| skeptics, I have a bridge to sell you).
| abbadadda wrote:
| > Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and
| Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense
| that our inventions had destroyed our humanity.
|
| Were they wrong?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If they're right, our humanity was destroyed long before any of
| us were born.
|
| So... how would we know?
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Maybe "destroyed" is too strong a word. I would say
| "suppressed" is better, at least for some people.
|
| Spend 3 days in deep nature, or meditate etc, and you can
| uncover your humanity....
| lm28469 wrote:
| Yeah our lives are mostly noise, we flip between working
| and "chilling" with virtually no inbetween idleness
| anymore.
|
| Go look at the clouds, or better the stars, for some time.
| But don't do it tool long because you might start wondering
| why the fuck you're wasting so much time and energy
| fulfilling other people's TODO lists
| djeastm wrote:
| Humanity had its inherent problems well before any technology
| was invented.
| saulpw wrote:
| Yes but technology exacerbated them. The great wars of the
| 20th century killed 10s of millions of people, 10x more per
| year than any other conflict.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Man-made climate change is also new experience for
| humanity.
| bawolff wrote:
| Maybe, but what about per capita? More people participating
| equals more people killed, but at the same time i dont
| think you need high technology to engage in a mass
| slaughter, swords work just as well.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > "Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has
| a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he
| shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going
| once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else,
| somewhere else, always somewhere else."
|
| Previously:
|
| "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit
| quietly in a room alone."
|
| -- Blaise Pascal (~1650)
| teamonkey wrote:
| Pascal's quote rings differently today.
| labrador wrote:
| I recently finished an audiobook that describes the history of
| cocaine and opiate use in that era. The drugs were unregulated
| until addiction became an issue. I'm interested in how drugs
| shape our society so I appreciate books like this that fill in
| the missing history.
|
| David Farber - Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the
| Decade of Greed [Audiobook]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxm0hYnGezA
| theragra wrote:
| It was extremely widespread in Russian Empire too. To the
| extent that not only poets and artists used morphine and
| cocaine, but also some high ranking officials. One of the
| police chiefs, for example, was both morphinist and alcoholic.
| starchild3001 wrote:
| USA had a nearly constant per person economic growth rate of
| 2%/year in the last ~150 years, perhaps going as far back as the
| beginning of industrial revolution.
|
| Extrapolating such curves into the future suggests the current AI
| revolution is simply the last and latest node in a string of
| revolutions and it's nothing special.
|
| If you think about it, having the world's all information at your
| fingertips (google), and in your pocket (iphone) might have been
| equally revolutionary. And before that came TV, radio, car,
| train, boat, plane, electricity, gas engine, steam engine etc as
| revolutions.
|
| There's nothing that suggests the economic output per person is
| accelerating beyond the historical 2%/year. What could be
| reasons? Perhaps limited electricity, compute, AI model quality,
| computer speed etc.
|
| So, the more analytical side of me thinks what we're experiencing
| is nothing extraordinary. It's just another revolution in a
| string of many :)
|
| Obviously, my other, the more human side gets scared and feels
| afraid about the meaning of life, and humanity's place in it.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Statistical next-token predictors that aren't even correct some
| of the time, and are currently crafted to pass tests, isn't
| what I would consider revolutionary.
|
| They're neat tools. They help some people (a much, much smaller
| group of people than most think) be a bit more productive.
|
| If LLMs are considered revolutionary, we are stagnating.
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, for information and reference we already had Wikipedia and
| billions of web pages indexed in Google, searchable by keyword.
| For questions we had reddit, StackOverflow and forums. For
| chatting we had social networks, chatting with real humans. For
| image we had only search, but within billions of images. Faster
| than gen AI, and made by humans. For code we had hundreds of
| thousands of repos.
|
| We already had the genAI goodies for 2 decades. It's not going
| to be such a shocking change.
| theragra wrote:
| If you think america moved too fast in the beginning of the
| century, try Russian Empire. Not only the same technological
| marvels as everywhere in the west, but also three revolutions and
| several wars. Change of government from monarchy to
| parlamentarism to socialism. Also, countless posts, painters and
| new genres of art.
|
| If you know Russian, Dusk Of The Empire podcast is pretty cool.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCL7ox52jCNuMcckQSc0o5HQ#botto...
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Seems like the Russian empire didn't really progress, just went
| around in circles.
|
| And now the USA is starting to circle back.
| theragra wrote:
| Well, technologically everyone progresses. But societal
| change seems to be much harder. Still, most people were
| illiterate and young children were valued close to nothing
| among peasants. Children mortality up to 5 years old was 60%.
|
| Thinking of it, even current (terrible) war pales in
| comparison.
| elcritch wrote:
| Oddly that puts the old Roman social conception of children
| bit more into perspective. They viewed children as nuisance
| to adults, particularly to men, from what I gather. Not
| that later European or other cultures were much different.
|
| Makes a cold sorta sense - why even bother getting too
| close to them if most won't even survive to become a useful
| adult. Rough world.
| stevenfoster wrote:
| I remember reading Theodore Roosevelt's biography by Edmund
| Morris and being shocked how he was basically able to text
| everyone he needed to be in contact with while president through
| the telegraph system.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Thomas Pynchon's _Against the Day_ is an interesting read on this
| and explores the rapid changes in a far more human way than
| anything else I have read on the period. He renders it as the
| period when technology and knowledge ceased being things of the
| select few and become a large enough part of the average person
| 's life, and this being what caused the real change; knowledge
| fundamentally changed society's relationship with the unknown and
| technology played a shell game with what is inconvenient. His
| treatment of photography and the development of film is really
| interesting and does an amazing job of showing what we lost as
| well as what we gained.
| Macha wrote:
| One example that was recently pointed out to me: the first 737
| was closer in time to the wright brothers first flight than to
| today
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