My own view is that the turn of the century,
particularly in America, represented a period that will someday be compared to
the Renaissance in that within a period of very short time, 15-20 years, most
of the break-throughs in technology occurred that now influence our lives so
heavily. Everything since then has been engineering. You break through and
record sound. Now everything since is engineering. You improve it, but when
you first did it, it was a miracle. You capture sight, you capture motion.
Motion picture comes about this time. Now everything since is engineering.
It's technology. Sure, the picture's better, but the idea of seeing people
move on a screen is new. A horseless carriage in 1900? All of these things
came remarkably within a short time. The electric light, for heaven's sake.
The electric current, the dynamo, again, just a few years before this, right
around the turn of the century. Serendipity that it happened to be around
1900. It could have been 40 years earlier or 40 years later. It happened to
be right at the turn of the century. I think that's remarkable and I think
that this little piece, oddly, captures all that. No one was paying much
attention, but certainly at the time people thought all of these things would
benefit mankind, and by the way, a lot of them did. All you gotta do is go
back and read about, for instance, let's talk about horse manure. Twenty
thousand pounds of it were generated in the City of New York around that time,
around 1900. You talk about pollution? The automobile was hailed as the
savior of our city streets. You know that one of the reasons that women's
skirts went up was because of the advent of the automobile and the self-started
so they could drive a car? I mean it changed everything in life.
My feeling, from the reading I've done and a few of the old timers that I've
talked to and still can talk about it, was that it was just wonderful. And
wasn't it great that we could telephone somebody and wasn't it great that you
had an automobile and could take a drive in the country and wasn't it wonderful
that the trains were not transcontinental and that you could buy a phonograph
record of Enrico Caruso and all of these things? Yes, I think that that
generation saw these things as totally positive.
I think the big difference between those people in 1900 and us today, as we see
the Computer Revolution, let's say, or we see the Space Program, I think that,
again, carefully you use the word "miracle". To them, these miracles that
everyone said couldn't happen, couldn't happen -- remember, flight is only
three years away -- the Wright Brothers are just three years away from 1900 --
can't happen. It's against the laws of God. These things all took place in
that form of -- of a miraculous nature. Now today we read about the Mars
landing or we read about a space probe and we think, "Oh, gosh, isn't that
great." But it's logical. It started here and it moved here. Same way with
flight. The jets will be faster and the movie will now be in digital and all
of these things. Okay, that's just progress. That's engineering. It's not a
miracle. And I love to read things from the period that talk about this
miraculous quality as if it were almost metaphysical. The acceptance of
mystery having to do with something that everywhere now call or perhaps they
called "technological". It's a cross-over of some kind between, in my view,
the human spirit and what man, the makers, can do. And, again, the remarkable
thing to me is not so much that these things happened, but that they coalesced
around 1900.
I think it had very little to do with the sociology of the time, with the
economics of the time. It had to do with these break-throughs. Do you realize
that when the phonograph broke through just prior to 1900, that there were
touring groups that went out with an old cylinder phonograph and the horn that
you yelled into and the little mica diaphragm that transcribed, and they'd go
to a town and they'd rent a hall and people would come and they'd play the
phonograph and there'd be a dog barking. (Barks Twice and Claps) And people
would applaud. And then the leading citizens of the town would come up. The
mayor would come up and they'd instruct him and he would say, "Hello?" And
they'd play it back, "Hello?" (Claps) And people would applaud. It didn't
last very long. It lost its miraculous quality, but there were -- I've seen a
dozen articles about "What if we'd have had this at Gettysburg so we could hear
him? What if we'd have had it at Golgatha and we could have heard what he
really said? From now on, we'll hear them. From now on." But it started in
1878.
That speculation about, "Whew, I wish we could have heard George Washington. I
wish we could have heard Lincoln. I wish we could hear Christ speaking." Now
it's all taken for granted. Again, we're all fascinated by the developments of
it, but I keep using the word "engineering". Tape recording was an engineering
break-through. Digital sound is an engineering break-through. And, by the
way, it's very interesting. You start in 1900 and you can go right to the
present day and read the trades and read the magazines and they say, "Finally
we have the human voice reproduced so that you can't tell the difference." In
1900 they said, "It will never get any better. This is exactly the way this
person sounds." It goes on and on and we're still conned by it.
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