"The world has changed more in the last 100 years than in any 1000 years that have gone before." And, what, we wonder, would those Edwardians/progressive-era denizens think of the changes that have gone into the next 100 after that? From telegraph to satellite, from "aeroplanes" to space stations, from flickering silents to IMAX 3D, from wireless to HD television, from X-Rays to MRIs, and more. We know now what it will be like in 2010, as it is just around the corner; I wonder could they have imagined?
A hundred years back may seem a long while ago, but when you remember that there are men living to-day whose fathers saw General Washington, a century does not seem so long a time after all. And up to the time of Washington a hundred years did not mean very much to the human race. The world moved very slowly. When Washington died, in 1799, people were using the same sort of appliances and doing the same things in the same way that they did in 1699 and even in 1599. In former times, if a man could have returned to earth at the end of a hundred years, he would not have been very much surprised at any of the changes that had taken place during his absence. But if Washington or Franklin, or even Thomas Jefferson, who died less than a century ago, were to come back to earth now, he would not know where he was. The world has changed more in the last one hundred years than in any thousand years that have gone before.
To get some idea of the wonderful changes that have taken place, let us go back to Thanksgiving Day in 1810 and note how many, many things our great-grandparents did not have which we have to-day. It will not only astonish us, but it will also make us realize how much we have to be thankful for.
In the first place, there was no Thanksgiving Day in 1810, except in New England. It was only a little over forty years ago that the people all over the United States began to celebrate the day. Before that, if one did not live in Boston or very close to it he probably would never have eaten a Thanksgiving dinner. But even those who were fortunate enough to live in New England did not have anything like the variety of good things for dinner that we have to-day. Of course they had turkey and pumpkin-pie and onions and cranberry sauce and potatoes; but they did not have tomatoes or corn or peas or string-beans or beets or asparagus or any of the other canned vegetables that we are accustomed to eating during the winter months. There were no canned goods of any kind. There were no tin cans. Neither were there any cars to bring fresh fruits and vegetables —like strawberries and tomatoes and lettuce—from the South and from California. In fact, there were then no such places in the United States as Florida and Texas and California. They were all of them waste places or foreign lands. They belonged to England and Spain and France and Mexico.
Oranges, bananas, pineapples, grape-fruit, olives, Malaga grapes, and other tropical fruits which are so familiar to all of us, were never seen in the markets in 1810. Boys and girls of that day only heard about them from travelers or read of them in books.
Dinners were cooked in fireplaces. There were no ranges. There were no gas-stoves; no oilstoves; no coal-stoves; no cook-stoves of any kind. Housewives had no baking-powder, no yeast cakes, no self-rising flour, no granulated sugar, no flavoring extracts, no ground spices, no cocoa, no potted meats, no catsup, no prepared breakfast foods, no soda-crackers, no macaroni. All the coffee had to be roasted and ground at home. Housekeepers then had very few of the conveniences that they have to-day. They had no running water in the houses, or stationary wash tubs or clothes-wringers or washing-machines or wire clothes-lines. Neither had they refrigerators or ice-cream freezers or egg-beaters or waffle-irons or apple-parers or lemon-squeezers or flat-irons or meat-grinders or carpet-sweepers or ammonia or borax or gasolene or moth-balls or fly-paper or fly-screens. And they had no matches, and they had no electric lights or gaslight, and no kerosene.
There were no sewing-machines in 1810. All clothes were made by hand. There were no ready-made things of any kind; not even shoes or hats. Nearly every family spun its own wool and flax and made its own thread and yarn and cloth. The clothes for the boys and girls and the men and women were made at home. So, also, were the carpets, the candles, the soap, the mattresses, and the chairs and tables. There were no furniture-factories; no ready-made desks or bookcases or bedsteads or anything else. Such things as were not made at home were made to order by the shoemaker or the hatter or the tailor or the cabinet-maker. Clothing-stores, shoe-stores, hat-stores, furniture-stores, were unheard of.
In 1810 nobody wore rubbers. That was because there were no rubbers. There were no rubber goods of any kind—overshoes, waterproofs, raincoats, rubber balls, pencil erasers, hot-water bags, or anything of that sort. There was no garden-hose; no fire-hose. There were no water-mains; there were no fire-engines. When a house caught fire, men put it out, if they could, by throwing buckets of water on the flames.
Fireplaces were the only means of keeping a house warm. There were no furnaces; no coalstoves. Here and there a wealthy family owned a wood-burning stove, but that was a rare luxury. Steam heating and hot-water heating were undreamed of. So, also, were kitchen ranges and hot-water boilers. There were no bath-rooms; there was no plumbing, and the towns had no sewers. And not only had they no sewers, but they also had no street-cars. Even horse-cars were unknown. All city travel was done on foot or by means of horses and carriages. And if any one ventured out at night he carried his own light with him—a lantern with a candle in it; for there were no street-lamps. Electricity and gas and coal-oil had not yet come into use. The moon was the best light a town could have at night.
Of course there were no airships or automobiles or motor-cycles in 1810. Neither were there any bicycles, nor any trolley-cars, and there were n't even any railroads. The locomotive had not yet been invented, and the steamboat was being tried for the first time as an experiment. All travel was done on horseback or by stagecoach, and those who crossed the ocean did it as Columbus did—in a sailing-vessel. It was a three days' journey from Philadelphia to Washington. Now you can make the trip in three hours. It took nearly a week for a letter to go from New York to Boston—as long a time as it now requires to send a letter to San Francisco or to London, and the cost was six times as great. There were no postage-stamps. The person who received a letter paid for it in cash according to the distance it had come. And there were no envelops and no letter-boxes. Letters were simply folded and the corners held together with sealing-wax, and the address was written on the outside of the letter.
As there were no railroads, news traveled only as fast as a horse could run or a ship could sail. There were no wires to carry messages, for there was no telegraph and there was no telephone. Consequently there were not many newspapers, and such as there were did not have much news to print. Most of them were issued only once a week, and such news of the world as they contained was from several days to six months old. All printing was done by hand on wooden presses.
The paper was made from rags. All the writing was done with quill pens—the bony end of a feather plucked from a goose. There were no steel pens, no gold pens, no fountain pens, no manufactured lead-pencils, no blotters, no typewriters. Pictures, in books, of persons or places were all made from sketches drawn by hand and engraved on wood. There were no photographs; no cameras; no kodaks. There was no such word as photograph. Those who wanted portraits of themselves were obliged to hire an artist to paint their pictures.
In 1810 there were scarcely any amusements and recreations such as we enjoy to-day. There were very few theaters, and these were to be found only in the larger cities. There were no circuses, no vaudeville, no matinées, no moving pictures, no skating-rinks, no phonographs, no summer and winter resorts, no excursions, no merry-go-rounds, no roller coasters, no Luna Parks, no Chautauquas, no pleasure trips to California or to Europe during vacation, no soda-water, no ice-cream, no chewing-gum, no crackers, and no department stores. And there was no base-ball, for the game had not yet been invented; and there was no foot-ball, and there was no croquet, and there was no golf, and there was no lawn-tennis. There were no public libraries. Books were few and expensive. The Waverley Novels had not yet been written; neither had the Leatherstocking Tales. There was no unabridged American dictionary. There were no novels by Thackeray or Dickens or Bulwer or Wilkie Collins or George Eliot or Charles Reade. Hawthorne, Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, Poe, Hood, Tennyson, Darwin, Spencer—not one of these great men had yet written a single line; some of them were not yet born.
Our fathers of 1810 did not know there was a planet Neptune. They did not know there was such a metal as aluminium. They did not know there was gold in California. They did not know that the country west of the Mississippi was fit for anybody to live in; they thought it would remain always a great desert and wilderness, such as it was in their day. They had never heard of quinine or morphine or vaseline or carbolic acid or sugar-coated pills, and they knew nothing of ether or chloroform or cocaine or any of the other medicines that are used to-day to deaden pain. There were no such words as microbes or bacteria or appendicitis.
A century ago there were still many powerful tribes of Indians in the western parts of the country, and all of the more remote towns and settlements were in danger of attack from these savages. The farmers and settlers of those days had no breech-loading guns, no repeating rifles, and no revolvers with which to defend themselves—only muzzle-loading muskets and pistols, for which they themselves had to make all the bullets. In fact, they had scarcely anything that the modern farmer considers necessary. There was not in those days any kind of farming machinery—no reapers and binders and harvesters and threshers, or anything of that sort. All work was done by hand and with the simple tools and implements that had been in use for centuries.
If the farmer of 1810 got a newspaper at all, it was a week or a month or perhaps three months old before it reached him. The news of the battle of New Orleans did not get to the farmer of Vermont or of Ohio until it had been six weeks a thing of the past. To have told a man in those days that the time would come when all the people of the United States, in every town and village, could read in a newspaper at suppertime of an earthquake that had occurred in China that same morning, would have been to ask him to believe a fairy tale.
In fact, not only the humble farmer of that day, but the scientist and philosopher as well, would have found it impossible to believe all the wonderful things that were to take place within the century. If you could have lived then and looked ahead a hundred years and told your friends and neighbors that men would travel by steam and electricity, that they would fly in the air from London to Manchester, or from New York to Philadelphia, that they would talk to one another from Boston to Chicago, that they would flash news across the ocean in the twinkling of an eye, that the great wilderness beyond the Mississippi would be populated with millions of people and contain some of the big cities of the world, that men and women would go across the Atlantic and across the vast continent of America in perfect ease and comfort and in less time than it then took to journey from New York to Washington—if in 1810 you had foretold these marvelous things, your friends and neighbors would have shaken their heads and whispered sadly to one another that you were crazy. If the wonders you related to them were to come to pass during the next thousand years, they would perhaps have admitted that there might be truth in some of your stories; but to say that they would all come true inside of a hundred years and that some of the very people to whom you were talking would live to see many of these magical inventions, would have been really too much for any sane person to believe.
And yet here they all are, and we are living in the midst of them as quietly and unconcernedly as though they were the most commonplace things in the world. In fact, if we were now suddenly obliged to do without all the wonderful things that have come into existence since 1810, we would think the world was very empty and uncomfortable, and that we might as well be living on a desert island.
But we must remember that in 1810 our great-grandparents were perfectly satisfied and contented without any of these things. They thought themselves very well off with what they had, and those who observed Thanksgiving Day made it a special point to offer earnest thanks to Providence for their many blessings.
Surely, therefore, if they could find cause for thanksgiving, how much more thankful ought we to be in the midst of all the blessings of the age in which we live.
And what will it be in 2010? Who can tell?
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