“Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.” - Octave Mirbeau, French novelist, 1910
About today’s piece: When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.
Welcome back to The Sunday Morning Post!
My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance:
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church. When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.
No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written. In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 1910, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.
In today’s TSMP, I want to share with you my favorite passages and lessons from The Vertigo Years, most of which come from the chapter on the year 1910. Great history books remind us that while history never repeats itself, its themes never stop rhyming, and we would all do well to listen with open ears. I’ve tried to limit my summary to areas of overlap between the early 1900s and the 2020s, but I’m not going to press the similarities too hard throughout the piece. You’re going to have to recognize them for yourself.
1. People in 1910 felt the world was moving much too fast
Transportation technology remade the west in a few short decades between the 1880s and 1910. A “bicycle craze” swept America in the 1890s. The Wright Brothers took flight in 1903. The first Model Ts rolled off Ford’s production lines in 1908. In Europe, cars quickly transformed the physical environment. The number of automobiles in France increased from about 3,000 in 1900 to 100,000 by 1914. That year, Ford's factory in Detroit produced and sold more than 300,000 Model Ts.
Model T, Wikimedia Commons
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