One Hundred Years

I followed a link to this interesting story on the Sky News site: Rare Film Shows London Life in 1904. Someone had discovered twelve minutes of footage of daily life in the streets of London in some Australian archive. They only have a 30 second clip on that site, but what I watched fascinated me. All of that footage isn't available for me to embed here, but I found a short piece of it:

I found some similar footage from the first decade of the 20th century. I've got them all embedded at the end of this post. Take the time to watch as much of them as you have time for, but let me try and explain why I wanted to post them: as we watch them, I want us to reflect on some things...

It was one hundred years ago, but their lives looked so... normal. Their cities looked so normal. Their daily lives looked so normal. The Olympics, the athletes, the mothers pushing kids in strollers, the older kids playing along the streets, the business guys going to work or stressed about making a deal. What struck me is how little has changed: I've been to many of the cities in these films and the landmarks and the people moving past them look pretty much the same today. Only the clothes, the hairstyles and the vehicles have changed.

But they didn't know what ahead. They had no idea.

• Those people walking around London? Ten years later an entire generation of British young men would be lost in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun.

• The airplane would change the world. Men would walk on the moon.

• Twenty years after the trenches of World War I the sons of the fathers who fought there would fight across the same ground in World War II.

• There would be a Great Depression.

• The movies and television would form a common culture around the globe.

• The atomic bomb, atomic power, atomic navies.

• The Holocaust.

• America creates the most powerful military and the most powerful economy in world history.

• Communist revolutions sweep the world from Russia to China to South America and Africa. After a 50 year cold war, Communism collapses and is replaced as a threat to the West by Islamic neo-facism.

• The personal computer and the Human Genome Project.

• America elects a black president.

The people in these videos had no idea what was ahead of them. They couldn't have imagined.

The other day Man of Science and I played golf, and he asked me what I thought the next one hundred years of world history would be like. I said that I had no idea. Really, I can't possibly imagine, and if anyone tells you that they can predict they're foolish or stupid.

I told Man of Science that although we can't imagine the surprises (good and bad) that the world will get in the next hundred years I believe that -- barring an alien invasion, an asteroid collision or the Second Coming of Christ -- the the world will look an awful lot like it does today. The clothes and the hairstyles will be different and hopefully we'll finally get our flying cars, but people will still be eating lunch by the lions in Trafalgar Square and tossing the scraps to the pigeons. The world has a lot more inertia than we realize and Western Civilization has been stumbling along for more than 2,000 years. I figure it has another 100 years of life in it.

Watch the videos and think about it.

Opening Ceremony and Marathon, 1908 London Olympics

Vancouver 1907

A Day in the English Hayfields, 1904

The Streets of San Francisco, 1905

Blackfriars Bridge, 1896

Boarding School Girls Field Trip to Coney Island, 1905

New York City Street, 1901

Paris 1900

Comments

[Chad Groenhout]

Great Post...