What Does It Mean That The 1920's Was A Decade Of Great Change And Innovation
Economic View
What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation? A Brief Guided Bout
Which was a more important innovation: indoor plumbing, jet air travel or mobile phones?
The first passenger train on the Fourteenth Street Bridge, over the Ohio River, in Louisville, Ky., in 1870. Credit... Edward E. Klauber
We're in the golden age of innovation, an era in which digital technology is transforming the underpinnings of human being existence. Or then a techno-optimist might argue.
We're in a depressing era in which innovation has slowed and living standards are barely rise. That'due south what some skeptical economists believe.
The truth is, this isn't a debate that tin be settled objectively. Which was a more important innovation: indoor plumbing, jet air travel or mobile phones? You lot could argue for any of them, and data can tell plenty of different stories depending on how you lot look at it. Productivity statistics or data on inflation-adjusted incomes is helpful, only tin can't really tell you whether the appearance of air-conditioning or the Net did more to better humanity's quality of life.
Nosotros thought a better way to empathize the significance of technological alter would be to walk through how Americans lived, ate, traveled, and clothed and entertained themselves in 1870, 1920, 1970 and the present. This bout is both inspired by and reliant on Robert J. Gordon's administrative examination of innovation through the ages, "The Ascent and Fall of American Growth," published this year. These are portraits of each betoken in fourth dimension, culled from Mr. Gordon's research; you lot can decide for yourself which era is truly most transformative. (Readers later on added their favorites here.)
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Trains, turnips and pigs
1870
The Ceremonious State of war was over and a transcontinental railway newly completed, assuasive like shooting fish in a barrel (or at least easier) passage from the swell cities of the E Coast to California and many points between.
Paradigm 
But even equally the glimmers of the technological future were emerging, much would seem primitive today. People lit their houses with candles and whale oil, and heated them with woods or coal-burning stoves that kept homes unevenly heated and smelling of smoke.
Only a quarter of the population lived in cities, almost of them in the Northeast. Families were big, and the population skewed young; in that location were five.3 people per household, twice every bit many equally in 2010, and 59 pct of the population was under historic period 25, while today information technology is more like 34 percent. By modern standards, the population was extremely poor, with the average denizen spending $2,808 a year in 2010 prices — less than the equivalent of the modern-mean solar day per-capita economic output of the Commonwealth of Congo.
They ate pork. Lots and lots of pork — 131 pounds of information technology per person per twelvemonth in 1870 (that number was half as much by 1929 and is effectually 55 pounds today). Unlike other meat-producing animals, pigs could live nigh anywhere and could survive largely on food scraps. Their meat, easily salted or smoked, could be preserved in an era without refrigeration.
Fresh vegetables were deficient; farmers emphasized crops that could be stored or preserved, like turnips, pumpkins, beans and potatoes, instead of leafy greens that would deteriorate quickly. Apples were the but fruit widely consumed, and much of the apple tree crop was turned into cider or brandy for preservation.
Paradigm
The diet of mainly meat and starch oft resulted in ailments like rickets and scurvy.
Most rural adults had 2 sets of piece of work dress, both fabricated at home, and ameliorate-off families had a nicer set of clothing for church building or social outings. There was non much in the manner of consumer goods, and department stores were in their infancy, but starting to appear in large cities.
Instead of a toilet, y'all used a sleeping accommodation pot or an open window in the city, an outhouse with an open pit underneath in the country. Modern toilets were an invention that was in its earliest phases during the decade of the 1870s. Big cities had sewers for both rainwater and human being waste, merely they flowed into rivers unfiltered.
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The New York Urban center subway wouldn't open for another 34 years. Boston had 700 horses per square mile. The average equus caballus produced 40 to fifty pounds of manure and a gallon of urine daily, which made the streets of major cities no pleasant identify to be.
By today's standards, amusement options were express. Total circulation of newspapers was 2.6 million in a country of 40 million people. There was no phone, record player, movie or radio. Men could become to the local saloon to drinkable; women mostly couldn't. Vacations and weekends were not really a thing.
Childbirth usually took identify at home, and deaths were mutual both at birth and during early years from diseases like yellow fever, cholera and many others. At that place was no licensing of doctors, so quacks were common.
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The lights proceed
1920
The Great War was over, the Great Depression had non even so started, and life in the United States in 1920 was profoundly different from 50 years earlier.
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The virtually fundamental shift over those decades was that the American home became, in Mr. Gordon'south word, "networked." Houses that were in one case dark and isolated were becoming intertwined. They were starting to be continued to electric grids, providing clean, vivid light without emitting smoke. Urban water networks supplied clean water, and sewer systems removed waste without the pungent odors of sleeping room pots and outhouses. Telephones allowed people to converse with distant friends.
These advances were enabled not merely past technological innovation in plumbing and electricity, but also past urbanization. In 1870, 23 percent of the U.s. population lived in cities, which rose to 51 pct by 1920. Big, ornate Victorian mansions were giving fashion to minor bungalows affordable to the working course, which took off in Chicago starting in 1905. Sears offered prefabricated materials for a bungalow that information technology boasted could be built with 352 hours of carpenter labor. A less obvious factor in making mass housing available: The inflation-adapted cost of nails dropped by a factor of 10 from 1830 to 1930 with the advent of factory product.
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It'south hard to overstate how revolutionary the advent of electric calorie-free was. In the 1870s, a kerosene lamp could produce 5,050 candle hours worth of lite a yr at a toll of $20. That same $20 in 1920 bought 4.iv 1000000 candle hours a year from bulbs.
In Muncie, Ind., in 1890, there were not more than a dozen bathrooms with running water and sewers across town. By 1925, 75 pct of Muncie's homes had running water and ii-thirds had sewer connections, including almost all newly constructed houses.
This is thought to be a major reason public wellness and life expectancy improved in the years leading to 1920. Many of the major advances in medical treatment, like antibiotics, were nevertheless to arrive, only make clean water and waste material removal — chlorination and filtration were introduced — cut back the death rate from typhoid fever by a gene of five from 1900 to 1920. The number of modern hospitals grew to half dozen,000 in 1920 from 120 in 1870, and medicine became more of a science, with doctors getting away from selling dubious cure-alls.
Transportation was undergoing its own transformation, and people were becoming far more than connected to one another physically. In 1900, only eight,000 motorcars were registered in the United States, but there were 9 million in 1920 and 23 million in 1929. Streetcars and subways, unheard-of in 1870, were in all the major cities by 1920. Intercity trains were becoming steadily faster and more than reliable — a train trip from New York to Chicago that took 38 hours in 1870 was 24 hours in 1900 and 16 hours in 1940.
Paradigm
Add it all up, and Americans who in 1870 would rarely travel farther than they could go on foot or horseback could of a sudden range much more than widely.
The social outcome was specially great in rural areas. Between 1900 and 1910, 1 local paper in Illinois reported on the arrival of each new automobile in its boondocks. The automobile "seemed designed to loosen ties and dangle the horizon before the unsettled," wrote the geographer John A. Jakle. Of a sudden a farmer had options beyond the full general store and the local bank.
The historic period of candy nutrient had begun. National nutrient brands including Heinz sauces, Campbell'southward soup, Quaker oats, Clot-O and Coca-Cola had been invented and began to fill up cupboards. Instead of a 1870s breakfast of pork and grain mush, a 1920s American ate Kellogg's cornflakes, invented in 1894, and orange juice.
Refrigerated railroad cars and in-home iceboxes meant that vegetables were now available in winter, and not just turnips. Growers in California adult "iceberg" lettuce in 1903, advertising that information technology could stay fresh every bit it crossed the land by rail.
Prototype
Still, much nearly a 1920 household would still seem strange to a mod visitor. There were no standardized electrical plugs, so even households with electricity didn't have appliances we would recognize today. Electric refrigerators and washing machines were virtually unknown.
Restaurants were starting to ascend, with fancy hotels in the biggest cities employing French chefs, and less expensive restaurants owned past Chinese, German language and Italian immigrants starting to appear. While traveling by car, options were few, only the White Castle hamburger stand would open in 1921 and Howard Johnson's eating place in 1925. A moving ridge of High german immigration meant sausages and sauerkraut were condign widespread. The hot dog on a bun had made its starting time appearance at Coney Island in 1900, and was condign e'er more popular.
Consumers were starting to have more options, as chain stores arose to offering more variety and lower prices than the small-boondocks general store, which in many places had a monopoly on all fashion of goods. The grocery concatenation A.&P. had 67 stores in 1876 and 15,000 by 1930. Local merchants fought the rise of the chains much as they have fought the rise of Walmart more recently.
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And increasingly, anything not available in a local store could be obtained by a mail-order catalog — the Montgomery Ward itemize was first issued in 1872, the Sears catalog in 1894. By 1900, Sears was fulfilling 100,000 orders a day, and its catalog featured fur coats, furnaces, piece of furniture and much more. The catalog business was helped forth by a technological innovation — bundle post, which arrived in 1913. By dissimilarity, in 1890, simply nearly a quarter of American households received mail at their door.
It wasn't just consumer appurtenances arriving at Americans' doors. Better press presses and transportation made publishing newspapers more economical, and the average American household read more than three newspapers in the time frame from 1910 to 1930, upwardly from 0.9 in the 1870s.
Telephones were not yet ubiquitous only were spreading quickly. In 1880, the telephone was used for 10 conversations per household per twelvemonth, a number that reached 800 by 1929; a popular class of amusement in rural areas became using a "party line" to talk with far-flung neighbors.
Prototype
The phonograph, invented in 1877 and in wide use by the 1920s, opened upward another entertainment choice: listening to professional-quality music at home, unheard-of in before generations. Outside the home, move pictures — nevertheless silent, until 1927 — were the latest thing, offering an affordable way to consume a new course of amusement. They were wildly pop by modern standards; a 1919 study in Toledo, Ohio, constitute 316,000 picture visits in a week — in a city with a population of only 243,000!
The age of electronic information had not yet begun equally of 1920, however: The showtime commercial radio station opened that year (and past 1923, there were 556 of them).
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From newfangled to normal
1970
The changes in transportation and communication starting to be seen in 1920 had become fundamental parts of daily life half a century afterward.
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Air travel was a perilous, uncomfortable effort in 1920 (Charles Lindbergh did not cross the Atlantic until 1927, and many died trying that and similar feats); by 1970 jumbo jets connected major cities around the world and were quite safe. Indeed, in many ways flying in 1970 was more than pleasant than today, with no security lines and larger, more comfortable seats in coach class — admitting at a much higher price than today.
Traveling from the Westward Coast to the Eastward Coast went from beingness a multiday affair past train to a trip made in less than a unmarried solar day, at least for those who could afford it.
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Cars in 1920 were uncomfortable and prone to breakdowns, and were driven on dirt or irregularly paved roads. A 1920 Ford Model T had to exist hand-cranked to starting time. By 1970, cars were comfortable, with options similar radios and air-conditioning. They were driven on comparatively smooth, safe surfaces on the Interstate highway arrangement, most of which had been built by 1972.
Paradigm
Homes were irresolute, every bit the innovations that were being increasingly adopted in 1920 became truly universal. Electrical light was in 79 percent of households in 1940 and 100 pct in 1970; running water was in 98 percent of homes, up from 74 percent.
Refrigerators rose to 100 percentage adoption in 1970 from 44 percent in 1940, and their quality improved a cracking deal as well; Consumer Reports described constant repair needs in 1949 that had been more often than not solved by 1971. The same was true of nigh all household appliances.
Air-conditioning, outset introduced in the United states of america in 1923, transformed cities with hot weather, propelling the population growth of places similar Las Vegas, Miami and Houston. There were 48,000 room air-conditioning units sold in 1946, which rose to 2 one thousand thousand past 1957. All the same, by 1970 just a minority of households had ac — 11 percent with fundamental air, and 26 percent with room units.
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Americans started eating a lot less pork and a lot more than chicken and turkey; consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables cruel as the proportion of people living on or nearly farms fell, while diets shifted toward much more than canned fruits and vegetables (canned vegetable consumption rose from 34 pounds per person per year in 1940 to 93 pounds in 1970). Margarine replaced lard and butter as the cooking fat of choice.
The size of grocery stores exploded, with a wide variety of candy foods; a pocket-sized concatenation shop in the 1920s offered 300 to 600 items, while a 1950 supermarket stocked 2,200, and its 1985 equivalent 17,500.
The age of mass communication radically shifted the mode Americans entertained themselves. A person living in 1920 could listen to a phonograph at home or go to a silent motion picture at the nearest theater. By 1970, color television and radio were both widely available. Movie attendance in any given week brutal to xx percent of the population in 1970 from threescore percentage in 1940. But those who did become could view lush epics with color and sound.
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A person had fewer TV channels and fewer movies to choose from than today; the videocassette recorder was years abroad, and then you were captive to what broadcast networks happened to be showing. This resulted in huge audiences; in 1953, 69 percent of televisions were tuned in to the broadcast of the episode of "I Love Lucy" in which Lucy has a baby.
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Brimful in a sea of content
2016
In 1970, anyone who needed to reheat leftovers faced a messy, time-consuming job at the stove — non the quick minute in a microwave of today. The microwave was introduced in 1965 and was not widely purchased until the 1980s, partly owing to falling price. It toll $495 in 1968, and a meaty model with more bells and whistles cruel to $191 by 1986.
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But the microwave is the exception. Most of the advances in home appliances since 1970 have been piddling in the scheme of things: a little more free energy efficiency hither, a more ergonomic handle in that location, greater reliability, meaning fewer repair calls. Indeed, while fashions have changed in homes since then, in terms of décor and layout, the American household works largely as it did then.
Airplanes connected getting safer, with the number of deaths per 100 billion miles traveled falling to less than i from more than than 100 in 1970. Travel became considerably less expensive — though the rate of toll decrease for air travel was slower from 1960 to 1980 than it had been from 1940 to 1960. Still, air travel had been an upper-middle-grade activity in 1970, and now is affordable to the masses.
Paradigm
By some measures, air travel has get more than onerous since 1970. In that location were no security screening lines (those were introduced subsequently a series of hijackings in the late 1960s and early on '70s). Seats were larger and came with free meals and drinks. Arguably, though, the bundle offered by circa-1970 airlines for autobus grade seats is still bachelor: You can still get a bigger seat and free drinks at a college price, but now it'southward called first grade.
Once you gene in the fourth dimension it takes to arrive early on and become through security, flight from New York to Chicago takes about the same time, and costs most the same in inflation-adjusted dollars, as it did in 1936; modern planes are faster, but and then one could testify upwardly at the airport 10 minutes before the scheduled flight time and hop on the plane.
Automobiles became more reliable, and car travel far safer, with widespread use of seatbelts, adoption of airbags and anti-lock brakes, amend engineering science to understand how to build a auto so that information technology protects occupants in a crash, and legal and public-awareness efforts against drunken driving. Deaths per 100 million miles driven have fallen from about 11 in 1940 to about five in 1970 to around one today.
Compared with 1970, Americans today consume a good bit less beefiness, pork and eggs, and almost twice as much chicken. They eat more fruits and vegetables. Just that's only part of the story. Americans are eating more of their meals away from home, and in restaurants more than varied than people in 1970 could have imagined. Thai, Japanese, Middle Eastern and Indian food is now for auction even in small cities.
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Some of the biggest changes to everyday life since 1970 accept been effectually information and entertainment. The cliché about Television set going from three channels a generation ago to hundreds actually understates it. The goggle box itself has gone from a 19-inch screen to 50 or more inches, with much more bright color and definition. Besides many more than channels, thousands of movies and telly shows are available at any moment of the day or night through on-demand streaming services.
And that doesn't even account for the Internet more broadly. In outcome, a person can get access to nigh any notable work flesh has ever produced — novels, movies, visual fine art — instantly and at home. Or thanks to Internet-enabled mobile devices that have get widespread in the final decade, nearly anywhere the person is.
Keeping upward with distant friends and relatives once required expensive calls on land-based phone lines; at present there are free or nigh free conversations through text messages, mobile telephone calls or video communication services like FaceTime and Skype. Sending a more detailed bulletin once meant writing information technology by hand or on a typewriter, putting it in an envelope, driving it to the postal service part, and waiting a few days for the recipient to get information technology; now it is an instant, gratis e-mail.
Paradigm
In short, the sheer number of ways a person can be in touch on with others, and consume data or amusement, has exploded, and the price has complanate.
This is the area in which human life has changed the most in the last 46 years. We live and travel much equally we did in 1970. Nosotros eat more diversity of foods. Products of all types keep getting a little safer, a footling more than efficient, a petty better designed.
But the real revolution of recent decades is in the supercomputer well-nigh people keep in their pocket. And how that stacks up against the advances of yesteryear is the groovy question of whether an era of innovation remains underway, or has slowed way down.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/upshot/what-was-the-greatest-era-for-american-innovation-a-brief-guided-tour.html
Posted by: bartleytheds1985.blogspot.com
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