Century of surprise

     Browse through an album of old photographs, and you will find that Americans at the end of the 19th century look anything but modern. Men were still sporting top hats and bowlers, while women were decked out in long dresses and elaborate bonnets. Many new buildings of that era now also seem like relics from the past. Twentieth-century world's fairs presented visions of the future, yet the showpieces constructed for the fairs in Chicago (1893) and St. Louis (1904) still followed classical traditions taught in the leading architectural schools of the previous century.

     But appearances can be misleading. Our great-grandparents were people surprisingly like us. They were excited over all the new advances in technology and science and eager to embrace what the next century could offer. They saw stunning surprises, just as their descendants did, but our generation should not forget how much of our "modern" way of life they already had.

     Some of the world's greatest examples of engineering—structures that are still in active use—were built over a hundred years ago. The Brooklyn Bridge and parts of the Boston subway system were late-19th-century creations. American mills continue to churn out steel just as they did a century ago when they attracted admiring (and horrified) visitors from abroad who wanted to view the latest in U.S. industrial might.

     In 1900 a communications revolution had already been underway for twenty years, and new inventions had begun to improve American productivity and quality of life. High-speed printing and cheap paper brought newspapers to the poorest citizens. Edison's electric light was changing the appearance of public places, and a few households already had telephones.

     Men and women of the turn of the century thought they knew what the future held, believing that the next great innovations would merely be extensions of the rapid technological changes they saw around them. The American Press Association interviewed prominent Americans about their predictions for the next 100 years in a newspaper series that built on popular excitement for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Among the politicians, poets, and business leaders who offered their visions of the future was John Wanamaker, a Philadelphia department store owner and the postmaster general of the United States from 1888 to 1893. Wanamaker forecast not merely expansion of conventional service over the next century, but also electrical communication over a national network that would eventually replace most business letters.

     Despite these insights, huge surprises awaited even the most technologically savvy prophets of the last century. No one in the 1890s could have predicted the long-term effect of major advancements in three areas: automotive vehicles, medicine, and microelectronics. Inventions or innovations in these fields have changed our lives and will continue to affect us well into the next century.

     Automotive Vehicles. Automobiles were familiar to people of the late 19th century. European engineers pioneered gasoline-powered vehicles as replacements for horses and carriages, but these new inventions were intended primarily for prosperous users. None of the American leaders who were asked for their predictions in 1893 envisioned a national road network; they did not realize there was a hidden demand.

     The American industrialist Henry Ford seized this opportunity. He began manufacturing an affordable automobile that freed its owners from the inconvenience of timetables and the expense of caring for horses. When Ford introduced a moving assembly line in 1913, it was not a complete innovation; late 19th-century manufacturers had already begun rearranging their plants for more efficient production. What proved sensational were the size and output of Ford's factories.

     Well before Ford's Model T, drivers of automobiles had started to change public spaces. Urban dwellers, and especially children at play, had long used city streets for much of their outdoor activity. As automobile traffic increased and intruded on local streets, residents of some New York neighborhoods began to stone passing cars. Child safety campaigns soon gave the streets to the motorists. As new roads made automobile travel easier, public transportation, which many users considered uncomfortable and inconvenient, began to decline. The automobile also industrialized agriculture. Henry Ford, who had grown up in the country, built his Model T not only to handle bumpy rural roads, but also to power many farm machines. Ford and other manufacturers eventually began to make gasoline-fueled tractors that displaced horses. This new equipment, in combination with other scientific innovations such as chemical fertilizer and hybrid seeds, allowed farmers to increase their production greatly, but farmers' expenses and debts also increased. These changes contributed to a sharp reduction in the number of small family farms, which in 1900 were still a foundation of American society.