1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind
Good piece comparing the anxieties of the early 1900s, an era of great and rapid technological change, to the present time.
In âThe Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914â by Philipp Blom, he describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it âcontributed to a nervous breakdown across the westâ.
âDisoriented 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. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.â
ALT Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or âsneakers.â The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called âskyscrapers.â The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoesâall recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals⌠The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all threeâthe simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.