The Turning of the Centuries

“On or about December 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910.”

-Virginia Woolf, from “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, 1924

The twenty or so years preceding 1910 were marked by revolutionary changes in how humans viewed the world. The ground-breaking nature of these ideas and inventions of the early 20^th century dwarf anything comparable in the 21^st. Maybe we are not far enough into the 21^st century to notice or to understand the significance of what is happening now. Or maybe the turning of the 20^th century was just a unique period not to be repeated again.

If measured by the number of new developments, the speed at which we're changing is continuing to accelerate.  Alvin Toffler's Future Shock popularized this concept. Toffler found an audience primed for the message: the book shot to the top of the best seller list in 1970. However, what's central to the present discussion is not the number but rather the impact of the changes - their revolutionary, creative nature. In this respect, I believe the “big” ideas of today fall short of the changes of the early 20^th century. Those changes in science, in technology, in public health and medicine, in art and literature revolutionized life on the planet. Today's changes seem, at least at this point, to be more incremental.

So what are some of the noteworthy events around the turn of the last century? Let's start with transportation. In December 1903, The Wright brothers made the first controlled power airplane flights near Kitty Hawk. Henry Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company the same year. That the world has been made effectively smaller and the individual freer by the airplane and the automobile, there can be no doubt.

We also saw electricity beginning to shape the modern world. In 1897, Marconi established a “wireless” (radio) station on the Isle of Wight off the coast of England. The tungsten filament light bulb made its appearance in 1905. Electrical power was being applied to everyday household chores. Washing clothes and cleaning house were to become easier and less time consuming with the introduction of the electric washing machine (1901) and vacuum cleaner (1907).

In science, Einstein's 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” overturned the absolute space and time of classical Newtonian mechanics and introduced the special theory of relativity.   Some years earlier, Max Planck had developed his quantum hypothesis, which laid the foundation for quantum mechanics. These concepts had an enormous impact on physics throughout the 20^th century and still do today more than 100 years later.

Medicine and public health were also changing. In 1900, Middlekerke, Belgium began chlorinating its water supply to decontaminate it – the first city to do so. Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their work on radiation. Radiology was born and the X-ray invented.  For the first time, doctors could see inside the body in a non-invasive fashion. 

In the arts, the new medium of film was just being developed. In Paris in 1895, Antoine Lumiere began exhibitions of projected films to paying audiences. In time, film would add sound, color, three-dimensionality, and computer-generated special effects. Its reach would span the globe.

With photography and film capable of capturing images in more realistic detail than an artist ever could, artists searched for ways to convey meaning beyond the literal (to mix metaphors) representation.  Painters provided new ways of seeing reality.   Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Braque's Violin and Candlestick (1910), Matisse's Atelier Rouge (1911) and Kandinsky's various “Improvisations” and “Compositions” (Link to Mark Harden review of Kandinsky: Compositions by Magdalena Dabrowski) are early examples of what came to be known as modern art. 

Western classical music was also undergoing a revolution. Schoenberg began composing his atonal music in 1908 (Link to String Quartet No. 2, 4th Movement) . Stravinsky's daring compositions about this time – especially The Firebird (1910) (Link to YouTube video of Stravinsky conducting the Firebird "Lullaby" at age 82) and The Rites of Spring (1913) – brought him international acclaim and an enduring reputation as a musical revolutionary.

Freud, Jung and Adler were laying the foundations of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology. Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899; Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious, in 1912.


French philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution was published in 1907.  "The book provides an alternate explanation for Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by ... a 'vital impetus' that can be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse...The book also develops concepts of time...which influenced modernist writers and thinkers....For example, Bergson's term 'duration' refers to a more individual, subjective experience of time as opposed to mathematical, objectively measurable 'clock time'." (Source: Wikipedia entry on the book Creative Evolution)

Influenced by the ideas of Freud, Einstein, Darwin, Bergson and others, the modernist literary movement began “on or about...1910”, following Virginia Woolf's analysis. The internal state of the characters became ever more important and techniques such as stream-of-consciuosness were developed. Some early modernist works include the first volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913), Kafka's short story “Metamorphosis” (1915), Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1916).

What caused this concentrated outpouring of creativity and invention? If I had to hazard a guess, it seems to have been a combination of several things:

• the continuing development and application of the concepts and inventions of the previous (i.e., 19th) century
• the serendipity of having men of genius like Einstein, Edison and Picasso alive at that time
• the new technologies that were then coming to the fore – especially electricity.

And what would be some changes or discoveries today that would make a comparable impact - i.e.,  that would again significantly change the "human character"?   Genetically enhanced human intelligence?  Discovery of life on a planet other than Earth?  Cold fusion for safe, clean, nearly limitless, energy? A cure for cancer? A new interactive art form based on computers/game machines, virtual reality and artificial intelligence?  The discovery of a parallel universe? A realized noosphere enabled by advances in communications and computer technology and the Web?  Any others you can think of that would qualify?

Most of these seem, to me at least, to be in the far future.  Unfortunately, the turn of the 20th century was a unique point in time not soon to be repeated.  I hope I'm wrong.

Random Stuff

In October 1903, the American League Boston Red Sox defeated the National League Pittsburgh Pirates 5 games to 3 in the first modern Major League World Series.  (I know - this is not quite on the same level as the Theory of Special Relativity or the flights at Kitty Hawk but I thought it was neat.)

The Victor Talking Machine Company was incorporated in 1901.  At about the same time, the bulky cylinders used in the early gramophones were being replaced by flat disks that were easier to produce and distribute.  Music recorded by others, both classical and popular, could now be enjoyed by anyone at anytime without having to go to a concert hall or other live venue.  The invention of the gramophone did for music what the printing press had done for the written word.

The concept of a "noosphere" originated with Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945)and developed in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).  The noosphere is "the sphere of human thought".  In Vernadsky's original theory, it represented the third stage in the development of the Earth, succeeding the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life).  For Teilhard, "the noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds.  The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass...as it populates the Earth....Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards...greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point...an apex of thought/consciousness", which Teilhard saw as the goal of  history.  (Source: Wikipedia entry on noosphere)

The now-widely used term "biosphere" was coined by geologist Edouard Suess (1831-1914) in 1875.  He met Vladimir Vernadsky in 1911.