But would that 1780 visitor have seen more novelty in the hundred years from 1814 to 1914 or the hundred years after 1914? Rather than adding my two bitcoins to the discussion of the modern era’s changes, I’d like to look at the remarkable revolution in human life during what is often called “the long 19th century.”
By 1914, people in much of the world could do things no one had ever done before. They could travel faster on land and sea than any natural power (feet, horse, wind) allowed. They could communicate over great distances, either by text or voice. They could listen to music with no musicians present. They could see moving images of distant places or of events that never happened in real life. They could use a form of atomic power to illuminate the night and run machines more powerful than had ever been seen. They lived in a time when scientists conquered diseases that had plagued an uncomprehending and defenseless humanity for centuries. Some - mostly in the spirit of pioneering - could even fly. By comparison, innovation in the last hundred years primarily focused on improving each of these breakthroughs - though admittedly at an exponential rate.
Every one of these subjects has one or more eloquent chroniclers. Here are a few of my favorites.
Begin with German scholar Jürgen Osterhammel’s The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (translated by Patrick Camiller), for which there is no other word but magisterial. In nearly 1,200 pages, Osterhammel covers politics, science, culture, and numerous other topics, not only in his area of expertise, China, but around the globe. He devotes much space to “Europe’s ephemeral primacy,” but without glorification: “Never has Europe released a comparable burst of innovativeness and initiative - or of conquering might and arrogance.” Not only science and industry, but “many of the forms and institutions of current cultural life are inventions of the 19th century: the museum, the national archive, the national library, statistical science.” In fact, Osterhammel begins with the creation and world dissemination of… European opera.
Osterhammel’s style, though serious and academic, is also touched with verbal felicities. “It was only a short time ago,” he begins, “that the 19th century, separated from the present by more than a full calendar saeculum, sank beneath the horizon of personal recollection.”
But if you don’t agree with Thomas Mann that “only the exhaustive can be truly interesting,” you can bite off smaller pieces of the age by focusing on specific advances. Since they are usually interconnected, let’s start with the three forms of energy that made other inventions possible.
First came the steam engine, a technology, as William Rosen explains in The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, discovered in Alexandria in the first century CE, but only put to practical use more than 1,700 years later. Rosen asserts that, “only twice in the last ten thousand years has something happened that truly transformed all of humanity”: the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution. He argues that “by any quantifiable measure, including life span, calories consumed, or child mortality, the lived experience of virtually all of humanity didn’t change much for millennia after the Agricultural Revolution.” From 1800 to 1900, however, all these improved radically, exemplified partly by the change in the productivity of labor through technology: “A skilled fourth-century weaver in the city of Constantinople might earn enough by working three hours to purchase a pound of bread; by 1800, it would cost a weaver working in Nottingham at least two. But by 1900, it took less than 15 minutes to earn enough to buy the loaf.”
The catalyst for this “hockey stick” takeoff in living standards was the steam engine, but more important, it was the powerful idea that innovation could come from both thinkers like Robert Boyle and craftsmen like Thomas Newcomen, with the added incentive of a patent system that allowed inventors to enjoy the fruits of their labors, causing an explosion of individual and collaborative creativity. Rosen’s range of observations, from the evolutionary synergy of hand and brain development to the social radicalism of England’s Diggers and Levellers, who demanded a redistribution of property, paints a broader picture than simply a history of technology.
Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, though moving almost to our own times, begins with the Pennsylvania discovery of oil and its dominance first of lighting, in the form of kerosene, then of lubrication, and much later, of the new motor vehicle industry, in the form of gasoline (at first “only an almost useless by-product, which sometimes managed to be sold for as much as two cents a gallon, and, when it could not be sold at all, was run out into rivers at night”). Yergin contends, “Ours has become a ‘Hydrocarbon Society’ and we, in the language of anthropologists, ‘Hydrocarbon Man.’ ” He also focuses on the role of oil in the rise and development of capitalism and modern business. “Oil,” he asserts, “is the world’s biggest and most pervasive business, the greatest of the great industries that arose in the last decades of the 19th century.” (Note: this year Apple passed ExxonMobil as the biggest business in the world, at least in market terms, and Google and Microsoft came in third and fourth.)
Yergin focuses less on technology than on oil’s role in the rise of monopolies and global competition. The effort of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil to destroy all competitors, its inability to eliminate foreign rivals such as the Rothschilds and the Nobels, and Standard’s importance in stimulating the progressive movement, can excite readers who don’t know a piston from an oil pan.
The third 19th-century breakthrough was harnessing electricity, which displaced kerosene just when the internal combustion engine gave oil more than a century of new use. In Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes tells this story through the occasional cooperation and frequent fierce competition of three men: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse. Like Rosen’s, Jonnes’ story is about creative synergy, the thirst for recognition, and the cash value of ideas in the new era. Like Yergin’s, it describes an intense battle to control a new technology both by outthinking one’s competitors, and by outcompeting them, using fair or foul means. Edison’s attempt to have alternating current outlawed, partly by proposing its use for executions, is one of the book’s dramas. That story also prefigures today’s events: the first execution, which caused one doctor present to assert, “We live in a higher civilization from this day,” was then so hideously botched that the “New York Times’s front-page headline charged, FAR WORSE THAN HANGING; KEMMLER’S DEATH PROVES AN AWFUL SPECTACLE.”
Of all these books, Jonnes’s puts the most human face on the process of invention.
A number of other books deserve comment: Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, on the breakthrough in urban sanitation and consequent decline in such killers as cholera; A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, a history of humanity’s fear of the night and its near conquest in the 19th century; Doug Most’s The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry that Built America’s First Subway, about, as the subtitle makes clear, the creation of the first subways.
But it seems fitting to end with a book that directly compares past innovation with today’s: Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers.
Standage’s book is hugely informative. The first “telegraphs,” he explains, were signal towers using wooden “flags” to send messages from high point to high point (like the Internet, a byproduct of military research), which explains why many of us may live near a place called “Telegraph Hill.” He finds constant analogies between the communications systems of the 19th century and our own innovations of the last 50 years: “A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romances blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates and dismissed by the skeptics.” Name a characteristic of the computer and the Internet, and it was probably paralleled by the telegraph: a stressful extension of the workday due to messages from distant markets (Reuters and the Associated Press were created for the telegraph), local area networks (LANs) in the form of pneumatic tubes for connecting a large office, astonishingly rapid spread after invention, and even cryptic shorthand (today’s “TTYL” was “SFD” - “Stop for Dinner”).
As Vinton Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet,” says in his preface to Standage’s book, “The parallels with the Internet illustrate the ease with which our modern-day hubris makes itself embarrassingly visible.” Or, as someone wrote on a papyrus more than two millennia ago, “What has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Books Cited
At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, A. Roger EkirchThe Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Steven Johnson
Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry that Built America’s First Subway, Doug Most
The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, Jürgen Osterhammel
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention, William Rosen
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers, Tom Standage
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power, Daniel Yergin