I think the article and the book tend to forget the terrible living conditions in cities back then, and instead psychologize them.
More than half of people in big American cities lived overcrowded -- that is, >2 people in a room, INCLUDING KITCHENS! Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
In big cities, the traffic in the streets, with horse carriages riding on cobble stone, and cars, started at 6:00 and lasted till midnight. Steam locomotives made a lot of noise and smoke. That's cortisol, lower immunity, more other consequences.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere. Not everyone had sewer, tap water and so on. I guess, a good deal of these people migrated to cities from more quiet places, and since there was no notion of harmful environment.
We tend to be surprised why modernism got so much traction, and even the best architects hated cities (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote something like "a city plan is a fibrosis"), but the reasons were everywhere, real and brutal.
So I'm pretty sure the reason for people being nervous, is quite physical, not "people were scared", as you may conclude from the article (although this is not explicitly stated).
[EDIT] Forgot about the social environment. When you move to a big city as an adult, without the college/university to give you social fabric, you're quite lonely. And in big cities this fabric was getting thinner with urbanization. And you're short on money, can afford only a bed, and count every cent. I think it's a more serious reason to get neurotic than times changing too rapidly.
We were also completely coked out of our mind. An issue oddly ignored by the article given they literally mentioned Coca Cola and so are presumably aware of its history. It wasn't until 1903 that Coca Cola removed cocaine from its recipe, but its use and abuse was absolutely widespread everywhere. People were using it recreationally, people no less than Thomas Edison remarked that it (in Vin Mariani [1]) "helped him stay awake." Popes were using it, generals were using, factor owners were pumping their laborers with it to maximize productivity, and much more. It wasn't restricted until 1914 and then defacto banned in 1922.
That's already going to increase anxiety dramatically amongst users, let alone the rest of society walking around in extremely crowded cities where a sizable chunk of the population was completely coked out of their minds at any given moment.
Saying everyone was 'coked out of our mind' seems a bit far fetched. Yeah there were niche products using coke and consuming/exporting it was legal, but historic production numbers from the period are a small percentage of modern production numbers even considering the populations were lower.
Cocaine exports then vs. now: early 20th century legal exports at their peak(1921 - 30 tons) were roughly 1/20 to 1/30 of current illicit production.
At the time most coca production was for local consumption, far less was aimed at the international recreational market.
> Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
This is not unheard of for south Asian immigrants in European cities, which typically do hard, low paid work (car cleaners, gig economy delivery "partners" etc).
All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
> All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
But at least people are getting paid right? The alternative is people staying in their hometown and not making any money.
Bullshit. At list in Germany. Here, the state benefits are so high, that the majority of illegal immigrants and "refugees" can have a comfortable life and procreate without having to think about feeding their offsprings, whereas the domestic population must pay ever increasing taxes to enable their lifestyle.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere.
LMAO is this most houses where I live in New Zealand. Smoke coming out of chimneys for people to keep warm, often burning coal. They have electricity of course but it's too expensive to heat their houses.
In remote Alaska it's the same way (though more commonly with wood than coal). When the temperature gets low enough, the smoke doesn't rise either, so air quality in villages (and even cities like Fairbanks sometimes) can get pretty terrible waiting for a storm to come flush it away.
It’s a matter of degree. It all adds up. Surely you’ve heard of the great smog in London? That’s an extreme example but all major cities had appalling air pollution. Bad air alone killed untold numbers of people every year.
I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up with horse and carriages only to see us landing on the moon before you die. That's some serious societal whiplash.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
I'm envy of people of the past having real freedom in their lives. I wouldn't be surprised that future generation would envy of us, who have the freedom to move fast anywhere.
Tech changed at a much faster and drastic pace then compared to now. Another example the first ever nightclub opened and ran from the early 1870s until 1910.
The Haymarket Historical Marker https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=121028
That will pale in comparison to how future generations view plastics.
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
Dismantling the moon would disrupt the Earth's orbit, so the most likely version of this scenario is not beneficial/benign (e.g, grey goo scenario), so you need to factor in the chance that you'll be dissasembled before you see it happen to the moon.
During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
Yeah, one house I lived at would get these random silent vibrations that would rattle plates on shelves for about 15 to 20 secs.
Turned out it was one particular ferry in the harbor. It was a smallish catarmaran fast ferry and when it was coming in a curved path it was like a narrow beam of infrasound funnelled between the hulls swept around and rattled our place 5km away. It took quite a while to notice the pattern, but was a great party trick to see it coming and predict the rattle to guests.
It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
Back when industrial hammers and drop forges were still common in the US (so like 70yr ago now) it wasn't uncommon for people say 10mi away to not feel them but 20mi away to feel them due to the magic of resonances and whatnot.
Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.
There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine.
Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction.
Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound.
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
I can hear the start-up of 777 engines at the airport, every night at approx. the same time. The airport is 12 km from my apartment and there's a hill in between. But my bedroom is facing the airport side and the wind mostly comes from that direction. It's crazy.
Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc.
Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep.
Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable.
And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.
I should add that it was not the sound that was disturbing them, these engines were sometimes on the other side of the country. It was the "unnatural", unending reciprocating motion of the things!
A great example of how things were viewed at the time is the poem by AB "Banjo" Patterson: "Mulga Bill's Bycycle", first published in 1896.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;
He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;
He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;
He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;
And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,
The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea,
From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me.
I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows,
Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows.
But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight;
Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight.
There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel,
There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel,
But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight:
I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode,
That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road.
He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray,
But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away.
It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak,
It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.
It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box:
The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks,
The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground,
As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound.
It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree,
It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be;
And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek
It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore:
He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before;
I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet,
But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet.
I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve
To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve.
It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still;
A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
This is during the 'bicycle craze' of the 1890s. The safety bicycle was gaining in popularity at that time. A 'safety' bicycle is what you and I think of as a bicycle with two wheels that are the same size and a chain drive. Bicycles before that would refer to penny-farthings and chainless devices too - that's how ubiquitous the 'safety' bicycle became, we don't even know of the other versions as bicycles today.
Part of that bicycle craze in much of the world was the buildout of paved roads. Before this craze it was all cobblestones and dirt roads, with a little bit of paved ones. Due to many people wanting a smoother ride for their bicycle, many governments began paving roads. Granted it wasn't really well paved, that would take the invention of cars, but towns and cities would pave at all.
And lastly, this safety bicycle craze would lead to the invention of flight. Orville and Wilber Wright were kinda hipster bicycle mechanics that stuck around and became vintage bicycle mechanics (to borrow current terms). With their shop and light weight minded mechanical knowledge they applied themselves to the problem of flight. And wouldn't you know it, they solved it. I also want to shout out Charlie Taylor [0] here. He was the guy who made the engine for the Wright Flyer. He was one of these guys, coming out of the bicycle craze, that you'd find in the Gilded age that could, like, invent anything. Reading history in the period, these geniuses were seemingly everywhere. I don't know what was going on then, but there was something about that time where you get mechanical geniuses in every little town all over the globe.
> A 'safety' bicycle is what you and I think of as a bicycle with two wheels that are the same size and a chain drive. Bicycles before that would refer to penny-farthings and chainless devices too - that's how ubiquitous the 'safety' bicycle became, we don't even know of the other versions as bicycles today.
What I don't understand about this history is why anyone ever thought the penny-farthing design was a good idea.
May be this is a bit of anachronism but this poem does not read as being anti-bicycle more so than it having hubris and lack of experience with new fangled thing (bicycle).
When someone passing through first rode a bicycle through my grandmother's hamlet, there was a general panic and someone even shrieked "the Devil comes, in two wheels!".
For examples of other books that show how much technology rapidly changed the world, I can't recommend "The Victorian Internet" [0] highly enough. (It describes the impact of the telegraph).
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
If you have children, I am often surprised how they seem to think that the previous generation was stone age. Particular example is that my daughter was surprised I would give orders to my broker via fax, and that the latency was practically the same they get on the free tiers of their online 2020s bank (this is France). My trusty old ThinkPad, which still boots as if 30 years hadn't passed, still has all such digitalized sent/received faxes I did in the 90s..
Children in general have a very hard time grasping the idea that their parents' lives resembled their own at all. For another example, look how every generation of teenagers, without fail, thinks they are the first people in the world to invent having sex for fun. I myself didn't understand how my parents used to easily catch me in most of my attempts to get away with trouble, until I realized (as an adult) that they caught me so easily because they tried the same sorts of things as kids themselves. It's just human nature, I guess.
I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
At what age did you notice that? My daughter is 5 and more often than not assumes that life before her was exactly the same as she experiences. Once in a while though she’ll ask if we had iPads made of wood or something like that which is amusing.
The Penny Post, introduced in England in 1840, may have been an even greater catalyst of social change. Within urban areas, communication latency was surprisingly low. Londoners got five deliveries per day.
That book - first published in 1998 - was one of my favorites for a while. An overt theme was the the astounding parallels between early-internet culture and the social practices of telegraph operators. At night (particularly) they'd stay "online", shooting the breeze with each other, forming long distance friendships - even romances! - and semi-anonymously socializing in ways that felt immediately and intimately familiar to those of us were on the internet around that time. I think that 'net is nearly as dead as the telegraph, so I wonder how the book lands for readers who didn't experience that milieu.
You might also like "When Old Technologies Were New", which describes about how electricity and communication in the home changed society.
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
Doesn't make a lot of sense, since the same families that would have had a servant or parent answer the door would answer the telephone the same way. It's not like young misses were carrying phones in their skirt pockets. A more widely-accepted explanation for dating is economic: young women forced into apartment living and jobs in the city as their families lost the farm and couldn't keep their adult children anymore.
- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
Also people forget that up to the 1830s, going from Paris to Marseille was a 2 week journey (unless you were a royal courier switching horses every 40 km, who could do it in a few days), and that sending a message across the Atlantic and getting a reply a 2 month affair. In the late 1860, going from Paris to Marseille was done in about 15 hours by train; it only got gradually faster since then (nowadays, 3h30, by train or by plane).
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
An interesting thing about communication systems depicted in "The Victorian Internet" is that it was an internet. Messages could be routed between postal services, telegraph, bicycle messengers, pneumatic tube systems, etc.
I would also recommend "The Information" by James Gleick. It covers all of known history so of course the scope is much broader, but there are familiar themes that accompany communication breakthroughs e.g. a train with a fleeing bank robber moves faster than the speed of our communication so we are all going to die.
I'd also recommend this book. It's sitting on my shelf - I had to hunt down a copy as I remembered reading it when I was a kid. Couldn't find a digital/kindle copy but I feel like reading the paper version works with the topic of the book, too.
Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
Let's compare the progress made by the modern world against the life of the tribes on the remote untouched islands.
Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.
For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.
Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
Life on Earth is going to be temporary - the Sun itself already guarantees that on a long timeframe. But on far more immediate time frames there have been countless mass extinction events and countless more will happen - in fact we're well over due for one. One could very well happen tomorrow - there won't necessarily be any warning.
For instance one hypothesis for one of the most devastating mass extinction events was mass volcanic eruptions. The volcanos don't kill you, usually, but they blot out the sky which not only sends temperatures plummeting but kills all plantlife, which then rapidly kills anything that depended on those plants and on up the food chain. Another hypothesis for another mass extinction event was an unfortunately directed gamma ray burst. It would end up killing life off through a similar ends, even if the means to get there is quite different.
It's likely that the only means to 'beat' these events in the longrun is technology and expanding into the cosmos - becoming a multi planetary species first and eventually a multi star system species. That we (and many other species species for that matter) seem to have this instinct to expand as far as we can is probably just one of the most primal survival instincts. Concentrated over-adaption to a localized region and circumstance is how you get the Dodo.
The effects of the largest volcanic events can be even more dire than that.
The Permian-Triassic boundary extinction, the "Great Dying", is though to be related to the massive Siberian Traps large igneous province. This eruption had the unfortunate luck to be through one of the largest and oldest sedimentary basins on the planet. So, magma was introduced into this massive basin, cooking sedimentary docks including coal, organic-rich shales, and evaporites (salts).
The result was truly massive gas emission, producing over time hundreds of pipes up to ~1 km in diameter that ejected a nasty mix of gases, mostly steam and CO2 (lots of CO2), but including chlorinated organic compounds from the high temperature reaction of the salts and fossil carbon. The halocarbons would have been enough to collapse the ozone layer.
Afterwards, CO2 levels and temperatures stayed elevated for five million years (equatorial ocean temperature may have been too high for vertebrate life to survive there). The ordinary process by which CO2 is drawn back down (by absorption into the oceans and deposition of carbonates via Ca/Mg eroded off continents) was interrupted for some reason, perhaps because silica-utilizing ocean microorganisms had been killed off, causing those cations to instead form clays in a process called "reverse weathering".
> Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
I'm not sure what the motivations of the people who developed penicillin were, but I'm happy they did what they did.
Also vaccines (smallpox, polio, MMR), indoor plumbing and chlorination, sewage treatment, electrical lighting (so we didn't have to burn candles, whale oil, or gas piping/lighting to every room of the house), etc.
> Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world.
While I think that is a profound insight that we should contemplate a lot more than we do instead of taking our value system (the one we all share, not only the ones we disagree with) for granted, I can't help also contemplate how inadequate, or underdeveloped, our language is as a tool to identify such. Hopefully, some day we will have more value-neutral means to properly view the relative isolated conceptual bubbles from which each culture views another. We're not there yet.
I love the show the Knick because it’s about the crazy medical advances during that period - it has the crazy innovation feel instead of the typical period setting - watch it if you can - Clive Owen and Steven Soderburgh
Readit News
More than half of people in big American cities lived overcrowded -- that is, >2 people in a room, INCLUDING KITCHENS! Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
In big cities, the traffic in the streets, with horse carriages riding on cobble stone, and cars, started at 6:00 and lasted till midnight. Steam locomotives made a lot of noise and smoke. That's cortisol, lower immunity, more other consequences.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere. Not everyone had sewer, tap water and so on. I guess, a good deal of these people migrated to cities from more quiet places, and since there was no notion of harmful environment.
We tend to be surprised why modernism got so much traction, and even the best architects hated cities (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote something like "a city plan is a fibrosis"), but the reasons were everywhere, real and brutal.
So I'm pretty sure the reason for people being nervous, is quite physical, not "people were scared", as you may conclude from the article (although this is not explicitly stated).
[EDIT] Forgot about the social environment. When you move to a big city as an adult, without the college/university to give you social fabric, you're quite lonely. And in big cities this fabric was getting thinner with urbanization. And you're short on money, can afford only a bed, and count every cent. I think it's a more serious reason to get neurotic than times changing too rapidly.
That's already going to increase anxiety dramatically amongst users, let alone the rest of society walking around in extremely crowded cities where a sizable chunk of the population was completely coked out of their minds at any given moment.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani
Cocaine exports then vs. now: early 20th century legal exports at their peak(1921 - 30 tons) were roughly 1/20 to 1/30 of current illicit production.
At the time most coca production was for local consumption, far less was aimed at the international recreational market.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037687169...
Not to say there were not other drugs on the market, like Morphine
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This is not unheard of for south Asian immigrants in European cities, which typically do hard, low paid work (car cleaners, gig economy delivery "partners" etc).
All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
But at least people are getting paid right? The alternative is people staying in their hometown and not making any money.
LMAO is this most houses where I live in New Zealand. Smoke coming out of chimneys for people to keep warm, often burning coal. They have electricity of course but it's too expensive to heat their houses.
I do like to imagine future generations looking back on the era of the internal combustion engines with absolute horror.
"You won't believe this, but for like 200 years, any time a person wanted a machine to move stuff, those apes would carry around tens of gallons of some crazy toxic combustible fluid which they'd spray into a heavy block of metal then bung 20,000 volts of electricity through it to make it explode. Just to spin a wheel! Then they'd pump the poisonous fumes out from the rear of the machine like a cloud of evil flatulence. Into the same air they breathed! There were literally billions of these machines all over the planet. Everyone owned one! There was so much of it, the planet started getting hotter! It was crazy!!"
Imagine if we ate and drank out of lead paint containers constantly for decades before discovering their health impacts. That's basically what has happened with plastics.
Here's one for you: There's a 10–15% chance, even barring radical life extension tech, that I'll live long enough to see the moon completely disassembled by von Neumann replicators.
Turned out it was one particular ferry in the harbor. It was a smallish catarmaran fast ferry and when it was coming in a curved path it was like a narrow beam of infrasound funnelled between the hulls swept around and rattled our place 5km away. It took quite a while to notice the pattern, but was a great party trick to see it coming and predict the rattle to guests.
Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours.
Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change.
Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine.
Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction.
Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
The pump it drove could have been loud, though.
There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep.
Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable.
And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
Sadly the memories of having worked with the machines persists
Dead Comment
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'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze; He turned away the good old horse that served him many days; He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen; He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine; And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride, The grinning shop assistant said, "Excuse me, can you ride?"
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea, From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me. I'm good all round at everything as everybody knows, Although I'm not the one to talk - I hate a man that blows. But riding is my special gift, my chiefest, sole delight; Just ask a wild duck can it swim, a wildcat can it fight. There's nothing clothed in hair or hide, or built of flesh or steel, There's nothing walks or jumps, or runs, on axle, hoof, or wheel, But what I'll sit, while hide will hold and girths and straps are tight: I'll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight."
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that sought his own abode, That perched above Dead Man's Creek, beside the mountain road. He turned the cycle down the hill and mounted for the fray, But 'ere he'd gone a dozen yards it bolted clean away. It left the track, and through the trees, just like a silver steak, It whistled down the awful slope towards the Dead Man's Creek.
It shaved a stump by half an inch, it dodged a big white-box: The very wallaroos in fright went scrambling up the rocks, The wombats hiding in their caves dug deeper underground, As Mulga Bill, as white as chalk, sat tight to every bound. It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree, It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be; And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dead Man's Creek.
'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that slowly swam ashore: He said, "I've had some narrer shaves and lively rides before; I've rode a wild bull round a yard to win a five-pound bet, But this was the most awful ride that I've encountered yet. I'll give that two-wheeled outlaw best; it's shaken all my nerve To feel it whistle through the air and plunge and buck and swerve. It's safe at rest in Dead Man's Creek, we'll leave it lying still; A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill."
The Sydney Mail, 25 July 1896.
This is during the 'bicycle craze' of the 1890s. The safety bicycle was gaining in popularity at that time. A 'safety' bicycle is what you and I think of as a bicycle with two wheels that are the same size and a chain drive. Bicycles before that would refer to penny-farthings and chainless devices too - that's how ubiquitous the 'safety' bicycle became, we don't even know of the other versions as bicycles today.
Part of that bicycle craze in much of the world was the buildout of paved roads. Before this craze it was all cobblestones and dirt roads, with a little bit of paved ones. Due to many people wanting a smoother ride for their bicycle, many governments began paving roads. Granted it wasn't really well paved, that would take the invention of cars, but towns and cities would pave at all.
And lastly, this safety bicycle craze would lead to the invention of flight. Orville and Wilber Wright were kinda hipster bicycle mechanics that stuck around and became vintage bicycle mechanics (to borrow current terms). With their shop and light weight minded mechanical knowledge they applied themselves to the problem of flight. And wouldn't you know it, they solved it. I also want to shout out Charlie Taylor [0] here. He was the guy who made the engine for the Wright Flyer. He was one of these guys, coming out of the bicycle craze, that you'd find in the Gilded age that could, like, invent anything. Reading history in the period, these geniuses were seemingly everywhere. I don't know what was going on then, but there was something about that time where you get mechanical geniuses in every little town all over the globe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Taylor_(mechanic)
What I don't understand about this history is why anyone ever thought the penny-farthing design was a good idea.
And it’s about bicycles.
Fascinating.
Especially when basically the same thing could happen with a horse.
This was in the 1930s.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Mulga-Bills-Bicycle-Deborah-Niland...
I remember reading the book in the mid to late 2000s and it felt so "current" in describing events of the day e.g.
- local newspapers were basically crushed by "international news" that arrived immediately
- the rate of commerce rapidly accelerated as people could communicate instantly around the world
- financial markets were impacted by the "low latency trading" of the day thanks to financial news being sent via telegraph.
- there is even a section about lawyers debating if contracts and marriages could be signed over the telegraph (like this on in particular as this was a debate in the early ecommerce days)
I was then shocked to find that it has been published in the 1990s. Really is a reminder that "new" technologies are often just updated versions of old technologies.
0 - https://amzn.to/4frEGyC
(NOTE: the link above takes you to a later edition)
One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.
To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.
My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
https://www.pbs.org/video/jfk-breaking-the-news-d7borr/
Similarly, CNN essentially became the mainstay with live coverage of the start of Desert Storm in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Gulf_War
The above url resolves to the following (which I have rendered safe/non-clickable by slightly mangling the url with “[.]” in place of “.”):
https://www.amazon[.]com/dp/B07JW5WQSR?bestFormat=true&k=the...
Here is a non-referral link to the same product page:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR
The book has its own Wikipedia page, which would have been a non-commercial option, which would lessen any potential conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
For instance, it tells the possibly apocryphal story of how the telephone allowed male suitors to call reach young women directly and thereby bypass both protective parents and long-time traditional romantic competitors. Getting a phone call was so exceptional that people had not yet built up any social defenses for it.
https://a.co/d/fnBimUx
- Bailey, Beth L. (1988). From Front Porch to Back Seat. Johns Hopkins University Press. - Henry, O. (1906). "The Unfinished Story". The Four Million. McClure, Phillips & Co.
The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world.
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham
About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
Super well written and very cool to read about not just the technology side of telegraphy but the culture as well, and how it still roughly mirrors culture found when the book was written all the way up till now.
Unfortunately the stories of success of the modern world were written by the modern world. So what we call as success or progress is only valid in modern world. There is no language or terms that can describe success and agreed upon across these two worlds.
For example, you may be able to wipe out that tribal population within minutes. But that may not mean success or progress, in terms of adaptation to the surroundings. Dinosaurs also ruled the land with their might. But adaptation is something different from being mighty. The context can get much more mightier against you.
Most of scientific and industrial advances were made by people who have no survival struggles and who were greedy for money or reputation. A lot of it was not needed for human adaptation and evolution.
For instance one hypothesis for one of the most devastating mass extinction events was mass volcanic eruptions. The volcanos don't kill you, usually, but they blot out the sky which not only sends temperatures plummeting but kills all plantlife, which then rapidly kills anything that depended on those plants and on up the food chain. Another hypothesis for another mass extinction event was an unfortunately directed gamma ray burst. It would end up killing life off through a similar ends, even if the means to get there is quite different.
It's likely that the only means to 'beat' these events in the longrun is technology and expanding into the cosmos - becoming a multi planetary species first and eventually a multi star system species. That we (and many other species species for that matter) seem to have this instinct to expand as far as we can is probably just one of the most primal survival instincts. Concentrated over-adaption to a localized region and circumstance is how you get the Dodo.
The Permian-Triassic boundary extinction, the "Great Dying", is though to be related to the massive Siberian Traps large igneous province. This eruption had the unfortunate luck to be through one of the largest and oldest sedimentary basins on the planet. So, magma was introduced into this massive basin, cooking sedimentary docks including coal, organic-rich shales, and evaporites (salts).
The result was truly massive gas emission, producing over time hundreds of pipes up to ~1 km in diameter that ejected a nasty mix of gases, mostly steam and CO2 (lots of CO2), but including chlorinated organic compounds from the high temperature reaction of the salts and fossil carbon. The halocarbons would have been enough to collapse the ozone layer.
Afterwards, CO2 levels and temperatures stayed elevated for five million years (equatorial ocean temperature may have been too high for vertebrate life to survive there). The ordinary process by which CO2 is drawn back down (by absorption into the oceans and deposition of carbonates via Ca/Mg eroded off continents) was interrupted for some reason, perhaps because silica-utilizing ocean microorganisms had been killed off, causing those cations to instead form clays in a process called "reverse weathering".
Which ones? Or is it just romantic conjecture?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
The poster also says about how we could wipe a remote tribe out in minutes. Something similar has been in the news recently with an AI angle: https://thethaiger.com/news/world/chatgpt-leak-exposes-plot-...
I'm not sure what the motivations of the people who developed penicillin were, but I'm happy they did what they did.
Also vaccines (smallpox, polio, MMR), indoor plumbing and chlorination, sewage treatment, electrical lighting (so we didn't have to burn candles, whale oil, or gas piping/lighting to every room of the house), etc.
While I think that is a profound insight that we should contemplate a lot more than we do instead of taking our value system (the one we all share, not only the ones we disagree with) for granted, I can't help also contemplate how inadequate, or underdeveloped, our language is as a tool to identify such. Hopefully, some day we will have more value-neutral means to properly view the relative isolated conceptual bubbles from which each culture views another. We're not there yet.
Dead Comment
The last 150-200 years really is remarkable historically speaking. I don't think we've grasped what to do with it completely.
https://youtu.be/08V4RHGuGqE?si=pyXBEJ4PpR0o1M5r