1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
100 comments
·August 10, 2025alexpotato
bahmboo
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
AshamedCaptain
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..
ics
At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
bahmboo
Usually when they become teenagers. Smug little know-it-alls!
bigstrat2003
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
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.
thomassmith65
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.
tasuki
I'm 40 and very impressed by smartphones.
Back in my day, we had a separate (wired) telephone, a camera, a notepad, paper maps, a walkman, and a million other things. Now I just have a phone and it can do all that and lots more.
villedespommes
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
It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
basch
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.
dylan604
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
mhalle
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.
wrp
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.
eszed
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.
eschulz
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
Finally someone who understands me. Whatever becomes measurable, becomes controllable, which is the antidote to freedom, wildness, life (to some extent)..
supportengineer
I’m ethically torn whether to upvote this
sdenton4
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
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
> 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.
noosphr
Electric cars were invented in 1881 a full 4 years before the first internal combustion car.
whaleofatw2022
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.
eschulz
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
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
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
Yep, they definitely could have bought it from Amazon.
inglor_cz
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.
zzo38computer
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.
leeoniya
> “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
Pascal’s quote rings differently today.
nickdothutton
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.
cobbzilla
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.
wrp
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
userbinator
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...
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derbOac
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
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.
ofalkaed
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.
ares623
Thankfully nothing horrible happened in the next 10 years or so
cs702
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
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
No doubt exacerbated by, and in turn promoting, neuroasthenia
abbadadda
> 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
If they're right, our humanity was destroyed long before any of us were born.
So... how would we know?
chairmansteve
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
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
Humanity had its inherent problems well before any technology was invented.
saulpw
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.
bawolff
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.
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teamonkey
Man-made climate change is also new experience for humanity.
cgh
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.
stevenfoster
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.
mixmastamyk
Lincoln started that I believe during the civil war. https://www.history.com/articles/abraham-lincoln-telegraph-c...
Merrill
A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.
Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.
ChrisMarshallNY
If I remember correctly, the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics; which, I guess, was kind of a big deal, back then.
JJMcJ
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
Nice! I never realized that they were working in the "hi tech" of the time.
Their accomplishments make more sense to me now!
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)