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It's fascinating to think of all the changes a 100 year old person saw in their life. And it's amazing we have so many around nowadays.
Think about a 100 year old person now. Born in 1923. When Calvin Coolidge was president. Civil War veterans were still alive. It was before Lindberg crossed the Atlantic and flying became standardized. It was a time before even the push button phone was invented, and look what they see now.
That got me thinking about hypothetical 100 year lives of the past.
Imagine a person born in 1860 who died in 1960. They would have crossed the Great Plains as a child in a covered wagon only to fly over the country in an airplane as an old person. Their first memories of a war would have been the Civil War while their last would have been the Korean War and first rumblings of Vietnam.
Or imagine someone who lived from 1869 to 1969, with their life bookended by the opening of the Transcontinental Railroad and man's first steps on the moon.
And, based on how fast technology changes, I can't even imagine what the life will be of someone born in 2023 who lives to 2123.
My mother was born in 1923, and lived until age 93. My grandparents were all born in the 1880s and lived until the late 1960s up until 1984. I used to spend summers with my grandmother when I was 13-16 years old, and we would talk, for hours about her experiences growing up in the late 1800s in Chicago. There is a lot that i remember from those first person accounts of history.
The most interesting person in my family tree was the first to immigrate to America in 1634. He was born in England in 1598, and lived through the entire 1600s, and died in 1702 at age 104 in Ipswich, MA. Not many people in the American colonies lived to be over 100 in that era, and even fewer had their lives cross into three centuries.
The various changes can roughly be grouped into various ages of commonly applied technology
Human labor
Animal labor
Mechanical labor and tools
Fossil fuel, with subsets of
-coal era
-oil era
-gasoline era
-natural gas era
Atomic power
Electromechanical
Electrical
Electronic
Microcircuits
Interconnected electronics and microcircuits
Computers
personal computers
cloud computing
Telecommunications, again with subset eras
Continuous wave
Radio with audio
Shortwave
VHF Television
Microwave
UHF
packet and other coding technologies
fiberoptics
What is as interesting are the technologies that are no longer used and are becoming lost.
Ann Pollard is noted often as the first woman to live in Boston. There at its founding in 1630, she lived to be 104. In 1630, the population was 130, by the time she died it was over 17,000. In 1630, it was an outpost always at risk of being extinguished. Everything was imported. In 1674 printing was permitted on a case by case basis; eventually in her lifetime Boston was the first British colony anywhere to have a newspaper; Boston even had its own mint for a time and of course, she lived through numerous changes in the colonial government as well as the fall and the restoration of the monarchy and England and Scotland united into Great Britain. While we don't think of it, she saw a radical change in transportation. By the time she died, Boston was a major harbor and the method of building ships had been transformed: https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1977. In 1630 it took at least 9 to 10 weeks to cross the Atlantic; the new ships cut the time to six weeks.
Buildings changed too. Today, the Pierce-Hichborn House 1711 is the oldest surviving brick house in Boston; when Ann Pollard moved to Boston there were non.
My Grandmother was born in 1915 and died in 2008.. She came close to seeing two pandemics in her lifetime. One of her brothers died in a Japanese POW camp in 1943. His son died about 6 months after she did from Alzheimers. Something that.. I won't say wasn't around when she was born, but at least seemed far less common. Or, perhaps, just less known. Families just kept it quiet back in the day.
But, she was alive and old enough to understand the start of flight (Mistakenly said the Wright first flight before) and the moon landings.
As some of you know.. I do alot of volunteer work with FindAGrave.. Documenting, photographing and GPS tagging cemeteries.. Take a look at this marker..
A little hard to read, but it says she died at 124 years old.. Which.. I believe is BS. That'd be the oldest person ever recorded, I think. But.. She was african american based on the cemetery... She would have been born and lived the first ~60 years of her life in slavery.. And as a free person the second sixty some-odd years.
I think for me the oddest 'double take' phenomenon in this regard are the gents who were older 50+ folks in the mid 20th century era - because they were all born in the 19th century of course. Winston Churchill was born during Disraeli's second ministry, and when he died the Beatles and Stones were in the charts. Harry Truman was born the year Grover Cleveland won the presidency as the first Democrat since the Civil War, and when he died Steve Jobs was already messing around with electronics with his buddy Steve Wozniak.
As someone born in the later 20th century this always was very intriguing to me because it brought things together that I considered part of distant history with things I knew of as contemporary.
I think we need a much greater emphasis on recording oral histories and some way to convince people that their story is worth recording. The NPR mobile Storycorps is coming to our town and arranging for people to come and tell their stories.
My mom was born in 1910 (d. 1997) and lived as a child in the same house that I lived in as a small child so I could imagine some of the stories she shared about when she was a girl before there was electricity or indoor plumbing. My memories seem trivial compared to some of hers (WWI, Spanish Flu, the Depression, WWII, etc.). None of her stories were recorded. That might be why people don't think they have much to share. I remember our first TVs, our first AC, some segregation and the civil rights struggle, polio epidemic, A-bomb drills, Vietnam and the counterculture, technology and the internet, etc. -- but those are sort of common experiences in my age cohort, and they don't stand out in my mind as worth sharing -- but someone born in 2010 might. I wish I knew so much more from my Irish grandmother who died when I was four. I remember her but there are so many questions I would love to ask.
I think we need a much greater emphasis on recording oral histories and some way to convince people that their story is worth recording. The NPR mobile Storycorps is coming to our town and arranging for people to come and tell their stories.
My mom was born in 1910 (d. 1997) and lived as a child in the same house that I lived in as a small child so I could imagine some of the stories she shared about when she was a girl before there was electricity or indoor plumbing. My memories seem trivial compared to some of hers (WWI, Spanish Flu, the Depression, WWII, etc.). None of her stories were recorded. That might be why people don't think they have much to share. I remember our first TVs, our first AC, some segregation and the civil rights struggle, polio epidemic, A-bomb drills, Vietnam and the counterculture, technology and the internet, etc. -- but those are sort of common experiences in my age cohort, and they don't stand out in my mind as worth sharing -- but someone born in 2010 might. I wish I knew so much more from my Irish grandmother who died when I was four. I remember her but there are so many questions I would love to ask.
Yeah.. Problem is.. people don't think about it until the person who could record the history is gone.
We were born in the 40-50-60.
We grew up in the 50-60-70's.
We studied in the 60-70-80.
We were dating in the 70-80-90's.
We got married and discovered the world in the 70-80-90's.
We venture into the 80-90.
We stabilize in the 2000s.
We got wiser in the 2010s.
And we are going firmly through 2020s.
Turns out we've lived through EIGHT different decades...
TWO different centuries...
TWO different millennia...
We have gone from the telephone with an operator for long-distance calls to video calls to anywhere in the world.
We have gone from slides to YouTube, from vinyl records to online music, from handwritten letters to email, Facetime and WhatsApp.
From live games on the radio, to black & white TV, and then to flat screen massive HD TVs.
We went to the Video Club and now we watch Netflix.
We got to know the first computers, punched cards, diskettes and now we have gigabytes and megabytes in hand on our smart phones or IPad.
We dodged infantile paralysis, meningitis, H1N1 flu and now COVID-19.
We rode skates, tricycles, invented cars, bicycles, mopeds, gasoline or diesel cars and now we ride hybrids or 100% electric.
Yes, we've been through a lot but what a great life we've had!
They could describe us as “exennials”; people who were born in that world of the fifties, who had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.
Our generation has literally lived through and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.
It is our generation that has literally adapted to “CHANGE”.
A big round of applause to all the members of a very special generation, which will be UNIQUE.
Lemuel Cook, 1759-1866, is known for being the oldest verifiable veteran of the Continental Army. From a few fledgling colonies to a continental republic; from horse power to steam power - on land and sea, from letters which took weeks, to the telegraph. He saw the industrial revolution, the modernization of agriculture, the canal and turnpike systems and the other internal improvements from education to medicine and of course the Civil War and the revolution in warfare. A revolution in medical care occurred in his lifetime, from smallpox vaccination to the reforms instituted after the cholera pandemic of the 1830's. Even the most mundane things changed, or mundane to us - the invention of photography, even the fountain ink pen. While not widely available, toilet paper was patented in 1857.
Last edited by webster; 04-25-2023 at 10:39 AM..
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