Comment by wistlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wistlo | Hacker News Reader

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I would argue for 1870-1970. Flush toilets, motors and light bulbs, communication networks ( phones in houses, radio ) did not exist before 1870, but were rapidly being deployed in the decade or two before the Queen's birth in 1922..

A book by Robert J. Gordon from 2015, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," goes through this in great and fascinating detail. The life of an everyday American in 1870, starting off with the chamber pot and ending with an early bedtime by candlelight, was hard to even imagine by 1940. As he lays it out , life in that year would be familiar to us: toilets and plumbing, mass media via radio & hardcopy webpage (i.e. newspapers), worldwide communication from home (telephone), refrigeration, etc.

I'd say the time from 1830's to about 1930's was the era of greatest change.

The introduction of trains in the early 1800s literally changed the DNA of England. As people started to regularly traveled 100's of miles away from their villages.

The transatlantic cable was carrying millions of messages by the late 1880s.

American history tends to be written in a bubble. Some people in the U.S.A. were using chamber pots in the 1870s, by the 1870s London had a sewer system.

Too often the U.S.A. plays up a fantasy pioneer past. While in the U.S.A. people tend of talk of the 1860s as a time of pioneers and wagons, in large Western European cities Maxwell's Equations were being discussed in mathematics departments.

My grandmother (1900 - 2000, ish), considered "email" (instant letters) and individual people's ability to "publish" on the web for the world to create and consume what any individual thought, as radical and important.

She considered company websites as fancy brochures, but thought individual access to almost free global publishing was astonishing.

It sounds like your grandmother was able to connect the dots and understand the big picture in her high age impressively well.

I tend to agree with you, if only for that fact that in the span of a single lifetime an individual, as a child, could have stood and watched man fly for the first time, and then as an adult see man land on the Moon.

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