I didn’t say that they had not changed, I said the basic configuration was well established by 1930, and this was quite different from early automobiles (horseless carriages). We would feel quite at home in the Duesenberg of 1930.
But the clothes are all the same - in the same way that a doughnut is the same as a coffee cup, topologically. In some ways a string bikini is identical to a Victorian bathing suit, but the differences is not in the style, but what they say about the society that produces them. Same as the clothing evolution you mention.
Every so often we have a thread about what to wear during interviews, and some people propose suits no matter what. I work in Silicon Valley, and hardly anyone except students wears suits. Not even salesmen do these days. It is a nice indicator of culture.
Here is another bit of future no one predicted - cable TV and the kinds of words you can say on it. Even the words that are bleeped aren’t really bleeped. We’ve come a long way from twin beds for married couples and Lucille Ball being pregnant being kind of controversial.
Photo sharing sites - not feasible with film.
Hacking pictures easily - not feasible with film
Photo modification sites - not feasible with film
Nearly everyone carries a camera all the time - not feasible with film.
Still camera and video camera equivalent - not possible with film or even the tape my daughter’s video camera used.
Easy editing for everyone - not feasible with film.
Digital photography captures images just like film photography sure - but it also enables all this other stuff.
Bell Labs guys in Naperville didn’t dress any differently from Bell Labs guys in New Jersey. Lawyers anywhere dress a lot more conservatively than we do.
But compare the billionaires of today - Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, with the billionaires of 1930. Big difference in dress.
Speaking if dirty words and string bikinis, here is another unanticipated (not even by Phil Farmer) and significant invention - the birth control pill and other long term methods. Cohabitation wasn’t different between 1890 and 1930, but was becoming standard when I was in college in 1970. Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson used false names in The Graduate - who does that now? (Not that you could with credit cards.)
It is a gigantic change in our culture.
Plop your average Joe from 1890 or 1930 down before a TV of today and his head would explode.
Indeed. Read any Trollope novel and you wonder how procreation ever happened. Men and women met each other a few times in society, and were married a few weeks later, it seems.
But of course this is a cultural rather than scientific change.
Who care that “the cameras look almost identical”? Right now, people can take a photo with a smartphone and almost immediately share it with people all over the world. Sure before, you could take a picture with your Leica, wait for it to be developed and printed, publish it in a newspaper, share the photo via the AP/UPI/AFP and then publish it around the world. But the immediacy that smartphone cameras and digital images allow is a huge shift.
I am not denying that, but I was talking about how the basic form of the 35mm rangefinder camera was already established by Leica in 1925 (prototype in 1914!). The biggest changes were interchangeable lenses in about 1930, and a bayonet mount in 1956. The M digital camera looks hardly different from the M3 of 1956 and takes the same lenses. Again, the year 1930 seems to be a good dividing line for ‘the future’.
Why just yesterday I used a hammer with a steel head and wooden shaft that would have been right at home in a toolbox in the Roman Republic. Where’s you future now?
I think sometimes we are too ready to accept the notion of technological ‘progress’. It’s what I call the ‘Steve Jobs Effect’.
Jobs thought that ‘cool new crap’ was what the world needs. Why is it that hardly anyone can read or write English anymore? Read the typical papers written in academic circles these days. Is anyone here familiar with the Sokal hoax?
What if you went back to 1930 and told people that today every new car has a device in it that knows all the roads in America and will tell you the best route to take to any place in the entire country - and show you that route on a screen on dashboard and tell you where to turn and give you the names of any restaurants that are nearby?
Or if you told them they had their pick of all the music and news and sports they could possibly want beamed directly to their car by satellites orbiting in outer space? And if they wanted even more they could put it on devices smaller than a pack of cigarettes and take it with them in the car or anywhere they went? And, BTW, they could talk directly to any person with a phone in their pocket no matter where they were?
Or if you told them that they didn’t have to figure out what was wrong with their cars because a mechanic could plug in a wire and the car would give all the details of where the problem was?
Wouldn’t they throw their hats in the air and scream that the Future was better than they ever imagined? You bet they would.
The Future is all around us. And it’s wonderful.
As for your post #157. Benighted people were saying exactly the same things in 1930. They were just as wrong then as you are now.
Sorry, sex got invented before that. I’ve read Fanny Hill.
But it is arguable, at least, that the scientific advance of birth control triggered the cultural change.
