These manifold advances doubled human life expectancy. Today the average life expectancy in the United States is 75.6 years for men and 80.8 years for women (in Japan it is almost five years higher). One hundred years ago was 46 years for white men and 47 years for white women. Pooled life expectancy statistics for the black population, which averaged only 33 years, were kept separate.
Such segregation would be unusual today.
Social awareness and tolerance were a shadow of what they are now in 2009. In 1909 there was no Universal Suffrage for women. The Civil Rights Movement was decades away, though, in 1909, the NAACP was founded (on the 100th anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth). This institution would, and continues to, fight for the rights of minorities in the United States.
LGBT rights were not even being discussed one hundred years ago. In many states there were laws against homosexual behavior. Since 1909 many of those same states have slowly gotten rid of these regulations. They were finally struck down in toto by the Federal government in 2003 through Lawrence v. Texas. Today it is illegal to discriminate against homosexuals and they are protected by many hate law statutes.
The United States had the dubious honor of being the first country to enact compulsory sterilization legislation. Originally this was aimed at the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, epileptics, and the physically deformed. Such behavior would be ridiculed as barbaric today.
But the most evident advances would have to be in our everyday use of fantastical technology that even visionaries like Jules Verne could scarcely imagine. Colossal discoveries in physics, such as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, irrevocably altered our perception of time and space. Much like the breakthrough of DNA, the work of titans like Einstein, Fermi, Planck and Heisenberg have so altered the landscape of mathematics that past visionaries like Netwon would hardly recognize it.
Engineering has followed suit. One hundred years ago, powered, heavier-than-air flight was barely even known to exist. In the coming decades it would give rise to the commercial aviation industry. Trips that would take weeks or months for all of human history now take hours.
But why stop with jet engines?
2 Comments
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