电气时代完整版(作业)

1、The Electrical Age, 1898 to 1934The 1890s and the first decades of the 20th century saw the introduction of some extremely popular new consumer items. A whole list of products changed the day-to-day life of the average person: safety razors, aspirin, thermos bottles, electric blankets, breakfast foo

2、ds, cellophone, and rayon. To this array were added a constant flood of improvements to earlier inventions that also found their way into daily life, such as the camera, the typewriter, the phonograph, refrigerator, and most of all, the automobile. The automobile, a novelty in 1895, was widespread b

3、y 1910, and it led to gas stations, traffic lights, and highway systems. The social impact, particularly in the United States, was profound and dramatic. By the 1930s, the automobile had changed the commercial landscape, with motels and highway cabins, roadside diners, fruit stands, drive-in theater

4、s, and the beginnings of coast-to-coast highway travel.As the generation born in the 1880s and 1890s grew to adulthood, they were stunned by the rapid changes, particularly impressed by the automobile, the radio, the airplane, and plastics. Like their grandparents, who had witnessed profound 19th-ce

5、ntury transformation brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the first 20th-century generation frequently remarked on the positives and negatives of technical progress. Life was more comfortable but faster. Cities became gradually cleared of the flood of horse manure, but soon the streets were chok

6、ed with cars and their fumes. Automobile accidents began to claim hundreds, then thousands, of victims. Information flowed more quickly across the cable lines and later over the radio, but much of the news was itself depressing, bring the horrors of war, political tyranny, revolution, and natural di

7、saster to the morning breakfast table. While eating corn flakes or shredded wheat, the average citizen learned of the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905, the progress of a naval armaments race between Britain and Germany unlike any the world had ever seen, and then the horrors of trench warfare in Wo

8、rld War I. Even before radio was introduced, phone companies experimented with using telephone lines to carry news, speeches, and entertainment over the networks as a type of broadcast system.The frontiers of scientific discovery moved into new areas of physics and chemistry in the 1890s and the fir

9、st years of the 20th century, opening some new and startling possibilities. While Einsteins theory of relativity represented a theoretical explanation for the relationship of space and time, rather than the discovery of new laws of nature, related findings such as Planks constant, the Heisenberg pri

10、nciple, and the nature of the atom and its subatomic particles suggested that some of the certainties of Newtonian physics were no longer valid. As in the past, the pathway between invented technological tool and discovered scientific principle was a two-way street. The Crookes tube, which had teste

11、d the effect of electrical leads in a glass-enclosed vacuum in the 1880s, spun off into a number of parlor-demonstration devices. The suddenly, in the 1890s, a burst of scientific discoveries poured out of experimentation with the Brookes tube toy-turned-tool. Within a decade, using cathode ray tube

12、 variations on Crookess invention, scientists discovered radioactivity, radium, polonium, X-rays, and the electron. Such new discoveries in the realm of physics, including a deeper understanding of the nature of isotopes, the electron, and the nucleus of the atom, began to pave the way for the Atomi

13、c and Electronic Ages that would follow in the later years of the 20th century. And perhaps even more important for the average person, the original Crookes cathode ray tube, with some modification, provided the ideal television screen, already in experimental commercial use by the early 1930s. The

14、short period from the 1890s to the 1930s was one of great inventiveness, but many of the inventions that had the greatest impact on daily life were improvements over existing machines (as with electrical lighting and internal-combustion engines) or simply the ingenious creations of people with good

15、ideas, such as the work that led to the zipper, the brassiere, and the parking meter. Such useful, everyday items could have been made decades earlier with existing tools and materials, but they had to await the matching of need, idea, and the perseverance of individual inventors.The times had chang

16、ed, and new terms to define the era seemed needed. In many ways this was an Electrical Age, with the wide spread of such electric-based inventions as the telephone, the phonograph, the electric light, the electric refrigerator, and other household applications. As Edison had realized, a network of e

17、lectrical supply systems was needed to make electric light viable, and then with the networks, vast new markets for other devices quickly followed for the office, home, and factory. Many of the new products were already available in quite workable form in 1890, but with readily available electric po

18、wer, their manufacture and sale became big business, with General Electric and Westinghouse leading the way in the United States and Simens in Germany.New weapons and ships and vehicles to carry them gave the wars of the early 20th century a different technological character than those of the 19th c

19、entury, as war moved off the surface of the planet above to the air and beneath to the sea. Navies adopted the submarine, destroyer, and battleship. Radio and sonar brought early electric devices to warfare. With older inventions, such as the machine gun and barbed wire, World War I (1914-1918) was

20、a chaos of human slaughter. The tank, dirigible, and airplane were used in that war to devastating effect.The new technologies of war struck deep in social impact. World War I nearly destroyed a whole generation of Europeans, leaving the survivors as the “Lost Generation,” disillusioned, bitter, and

21、 alienated. Out of the alienation came a burst of creativity and modernism in art, literature, and music.Ongoing technological changes gave the cultural products of the Lost Generation specific qualities. With the independence and freedom to travel provided by the automobile, relations between men a

22、nd women altered in obvious and subtle ways. Religious leaders were shock that younger generation saw the automobile as a mobile bedroom. Employment of women in office and sale work and their enfranchisement in Britain and the United States signed a liberation, represented by changes in clothing and

23、 hairstyles and noticeable different behavior and manners. Well-brought-up young ladies were now seen smoking cigarettes in public, driving their own cars, and wearing types of clothing that would have shocked their mothers two or three decades earlier.Technology had played a role in bring those soc

24、ial changes and would continue to shape the ways in which the changes were felt. The Jazz Age denoted the rise of a new music and a new culture that went with it. In the 1920s, a young generation of people of all races began to identify with the music of the alienated or marginalized population of A

25、frican Americans. The blues, deeply rooted in black culture, moved into the mainstream, not by accident, but because the music resonated with the national and international mood of youth. The phonograph record, the radio, and motion pictures all caught the changing tempo of the times and reflected i

26、t from the masses to the creative elites and back to the masses. Music moved out of the parlor and the amateur gathering as the radio and record industries created the 20th-century phenomenon of professional popular music.Politics and international affairs also were reshaped by technology. The great

27、 ideological conflicts between the flexible democratic and capitalist systems of North America and western Europe and the authoritarian Fascist and Communist regimes that began to take shape in the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany were at first fought with the tools and instruments of communication

28、media before being fought with the arms of war. Thus the cheap newspaper, set on linotype machine, with telephoto (or facsimile) pictures from all over the world, carried the news, advertising, and propaganda of the day, as did the motion pictures and radio broadcasting. Mass politics still incorpor

29、ated some earlier methods of arousing popular support, such as the parade, the torching gathering, and the public address to huge crowds, but all such evens were made more dramatic with the new technologies of floodlighting, recorded music, and the amplified sound of loudspeakers. And when filmed or

30、 broadcast, a political rally in Nuremberg or Rome could impact millions, not just thousands. Some of the great demagogues of the era twisted such techniques to sinister purposes: Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany built their followings with loudspeakers, mass meetings, and radio

31、 and through leaflets, newspapers, and cheaply printed books. In the United States, master politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt and religious leaders such as Billy Sunday and Father Charles Coughlin became adept at using the radio to convey their messages.Some of the popular heroes of the day were

32、 men and women who contributed to the new technologies or used them in new and striking ways. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and the Wright brothers became heroes of invention; Madame Curie and Albert Einstein earned fame as scientific geniuses; Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, as aviation greats. Radio, film and recorded music created flocks of new media celebrities, sports and film idols, crooners and divas, including Jack Benny, Babe Ruth, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Enrico Caruso, and Bessie Smith. Despite such bright diversions and mass impacts, technology