In "The Dynamo and the Virgin," Henry Adams struggles to understand the significance of the dynamo - - a huge and awesome machine. But, technology also represents and promotes changes in everyday life. The period from 1890 to 1910 was an epoch of wide-ranging and deep diffusion of new, everyday technologies - - from the telephone to the zipper, the electric kitchen range, and mass-circulation magazines. (You can find an extensive timeline of inventions here.)
Pictured above, you'll find images of three technologies that infiltrated everyday life over the course of the 1890s: Jell-O, the typewriter, and the popular genre of science fiction writing. Ask yourself some questions about each of these three changes: what changes within the culture (or, more specifically, the office or the home) are these technologies responding to? how do they reflect new social relations? what attitudes toward technology and change do they communicate? what kind of changes within the society and culture do they promote? (Clicking on the images should take you to a helpful wikipedia page on each.)
Posts
