Overview: Technology and Invention

1900-1949

Overview

The industrial revolution, which transformed technology in the nineteenth century, entered a second or mature phase by the beginning of the twentieth century. The widespread use of iron, coal, and steam in the 1800s provided a foundation for developments in chemistry, electricity, steel, and increases in mass production and consumption as the century changed. With the spread of industrialism in the Western world, many early-twentieth-century people viewed technology and science as venues for human progress and anticipated a near-future world free of want and war.

No figure of the first half of the twentieth century represents the promise of technology better than Henry Ford (1863-1947). His innovation of the moving assembly line to manufacture the Model T, a complex technological system, with standardized, interchangeable parts, transformed industrial production and made the products of industrialism affordable for a larger population. The resulting mass consumption and materialism became a defining characteristic of a mature industrial culture. That culture also developed institutions dedicated to deliberate invention and innovation with the goal of expanding the marketplace and material comfort. By mid-century industrialized nations relied on modern technology for the postwar affluence and prosperity characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century.

Technology Transformed

The developed industrial age provided mankind with a host of new technological devices. From Henry Ford's Model T to transistors, technology became more dominant in people's lives. Inexpensive motor cars created an automobile culture with its demand for highways, petroleum products, and repair and support services. Research and development in industrial laboratories, government agencies, private workshops, and universities produced myriad devices from airplanes to plastics, from rockets to ranges. Diesel engines and electric motors supplemented, then surpassed, steam power as the means of locomotion. Domestic technology provided many households with conveniences such as washing machines, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric ranges, electric irons, refrigerators, dishwashers, and garbage disposals. These laborsaving devices created as much work as freedom for women, who took on the mantle of household manager with increasing responsibilities for home hygiene and family care. Entertainment within and without the house relied increasingly on electric devices from radios to motion pictures. In countless ways, the new technology of industrialism transformed the way people lived in the first half of the century.

The Age of Electricity

Electrical technology developed fully in the first half of the twentieth century. The successful advancement of incandescent lighting resulted in electric lights replacing the widely used gas lighting in both interior and exterior applications. The discovery and use of detection and amplification devices such as diodes and triodes ushered in an era of mass communications. Inventors and innovators such as Lee De Forest (1873-1961) and Edwin Armstrong (1890-1954) made significant contributions to radio broadcasting with the increased use of vacuum tubes to send and detect radio signals. Vladimir Zworykin (1889-1982) and Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971) in the United States, and John Logie Baird (1888-1946) in Britain, developed television technology in the 1930s and 1940s. Because depression and war kept video from the commercial marketplace, it did not become a viable communications technology until the late 1940s, with its widespread use further delayed until the postwar prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.

An equally important result of using electrical technology to detect and amplify signals was the development of calculators and computers, first for rather simple arithmetic and, later, for more sophisticated computations and analyses. During World War II, the need for rapid ballistics calculations drove the development of devices such as the ENIAC computer by John Presper Eckert Jr. (1919-1995) and John W. Mauchly (1907-1980) in the mid-1940s. The appearance of the transistor as a substitute for vacuum tubes had an impact on computer design and a host of other electronic devices that dominated electronic communications in the second half of the twentieth century. By mid-century the age of electrical technology was firmly in place with phonographs, motion pictures, electric lighting, motors, and railroads, while the dawn of the electronic era had begun with radio, tape recorders, television, and computers.

Monumental Technology

The increased use of steel as a structural element and the enhancement of steam, electrical, and internal combustion power sources provided the foundation for technology on a massive scale. With projects such as the construction of the Panama Canal, Soviet efforts to mechanize collective agriculture, the drilling of offshore petroleum reserves, pioneering work on rocketry, and the erection of soaring steel skeleton skyscrapers and towering suspension bridges, technology in the first half of the twentieth century became larger and more massive in scale, more monumental in its impact, and more dominant in affecting the lives of those living in industrialized societies. Deeply rooted in research and development efforts and increasingly reliant on a scientific base, technological change accelerated so that new products and new processes became hallmarks of technology of the time. Consumer credit and advertising aided mass consumption of the fruits of industrialism.

This expansion of technology and widespread technological change were accompanied by more government involvement in the support of technological development from war efforts in weaponry, submarines, tanks, aircraft, and medicine to large-scale projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Authority in the United States in the 1930s. During a time of economic depression, technological opportunity and change were the means to improve living conditions in less affluent and remote rural areas of an industrial nation. Increasingly, people sought to extend the materialism of industrialism to larger and larger segments of the population.

Conclusion

As the culmination of the industrial era, the twentieth century experienced the promise and the problems of technology. Greater materialism, faster communication and transportation, man-made products, mass production and consumption, and widespread and large-scale technology marked the era. At the same time, the first half of that century endured two world wars and a major economic depression that deeply affected people's lives and attitudes. Technology was both friend and foe to humanity; the prospect of plenty and material comfort coexisted with horrors of large-scale war and the potential for massive destruction. Clearly industrialism transformed everyday life in urban, technological societies. Henry Ford had begun a revolution of production with consequences he could not foresee.

Yet, even with its failings, technology emerged as the source of progress. Partnered with science, it provided the means for improving living conditions, widening the world, accelerating change, and imagining the future. The public embrace of technology's value and the maturing of industrialism throughout the first part of the twentieth century provided a foundation for the half-century of relative peace and prosperity that followed World War II. The achievements and promise of technology during the first half of the twentieth century were tempered by large-scale war, the potential for nuclear annihilation, and the environmental costs of rapid scientific and technological change. As with much of technological development, the benefits realized were accompanied by long-range costs that threatened the world's resources and increased people's dependence on technology for their existence. By and large, though, industrial societies welcomed the major changes and achievements created by this mature industrial era.

H. J. EISENMAN