What would it be like to be born in late 1800s and survive to at least 2000?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What would that be like? Other than obvious things, how much has the world changed since, say, 1890? What are some science/technological things that would get you locked away in a mental asylum in the early 1900s/1890s but are a regular occurrence toady?

Let’s just say until the you died, you still had decent eyesight, hearing, and basic mobility. What are some things that nobody could ever believe mankind could achieve/invent would happen “for a million years” and have happened many times in modern history?

Aside from things like CD music players and computers and TVs, how much different was average middle/lower class civilian life compared to year 2000+ civilian life of similar class? How would a rich family from the 1900s compare to a poor, but still fed and sheltered modern family? I would imagine the hygiene and possibly safety would probably still be better in the 1900’s family.

2

So, aside from technology how has technology changed since the early 1900s? That’s going to be a tough one to answer!

3

I can come sort of close. My grandmother was born in 1913 and is still alive and with it. She knows I like to hear stories about her childhood.

She was born in southern Indiana, right on the banks of the Ohio river, the second of seven children to a Swiss immigrant and his second-generation American wife. She was born at home, in their “saddlebag” style log cabin–also called a double cabin, with a dog trot through the middle. There was no electricity and no running water or drains. Her mother made bread twice a week: seven loaves at a time. The most usual dinner was bread, navy beans, and canned tomatoes.

She went to a German-language kindergarten, then moved on to public school, where she completed grade 8 before dropping out to take a job as a housemaid. She continued to do that and eventually gained enough experience to be a housekeeper. When WWII broke out, she took a job at a vacuum tube factory, and was eventually pulled off to work on aircraft assembly. She was literally a Rosie the Riveter.

She met my grandfather after the war–he was ten years younger than her, and they got married fast. He was a doctor’s kid, but had lots of romantic dreams about farming, so they bought a ten-acre plot of land and raised chickens to sell the eggs. The first house on the property didn’t have electricity, but a few years in they bulldozed it and built a proper, modern house, which they lived in until 2003. Eggs she personally sold to the neighbors were her money; she also grew a large stand of blackberry bushes and sold those berries for money. She plowed up the entire roadside strip to plant an enormous garden, from which they got all their vegetables. She first flew on an airplane in 1980. She got a cell phone in 2010. She likes to wear Skechers sneakers–says they’re most comfortable on her bunions.

4

My dad was a child in the twenties, so he was familiar with radio.
But I would think for people before 1910 or so, voices of people miles away coming out of boxes unconnected to anything must have seemed utterly miraculous.

He was always delighted and mystified by microwave ovens. Another miracle to get food hot in a minute or two without ‘heating/time’ needed in the past. Even for the wealthy in 1900, if you wanted cooked food you might have a long wait if it wasn’t planned for.

Despite living in a world with microwaves for almost 30 years, he could only use the most basic kind with a dial that auto started. Keypads always remained beyond him.

The sheer scale of change people of his generation witnessed in a hundred years truly boggles.
His town was delivering milk and ice by horses when young, and this was not a rural area, he worked as a fireman on a tugboat (shoveling coal) and he lived to see the internet age.

Advances in medicine - surgical and other fixes for things that used to kill you. That’s got to be near the top.

5

What about travelling to the moon and useful airplanes? How did most people respond to those new inventions?

Also, how much has medical technology and knowledge actually improved since the 1900s?

6

In 1873, Sir John Eric Ericksen, a British surgeon who was the queen’s personal surgeon said:

We’ve come a long way.

7

I got one of the prizes the ACS gave to people proposing the ten best inventions of the 20th century with the entry I based on asking my mother and her mother. Mom’s answer had been “the Pill”; Grandma replied “hell NO, pads! Tampons! Baby nappies! God, not having to wash all that any more!” She’d been born in 1913 and died last year, so she wasn’t quite in the period mentioned by the OP but she was close. On the other hand, she always tried to use the washing machine as if it had been a tub. Most often when she complained that “it’s not working”, the poor thing was so overloaded its safeties had triggered.

In her case the biggest changes had been sanitary accoutrements (good) and machinery (not as good as a washerwoman). Things like communication well, she never sat down long enough to really pay attention. Oh, and her own mother had been a washerwoman with a unique business model: instead of going to clients’ houses and doing the washing there as was customary, she picked up the washing, did it at her house and returned it clean and ironed. Now you can’t find washerwomen anywhere in the developed or even semideveloped world; the closest thing is laundromats. Wahing machines are one of the first appliances people get.

For my paternal grandma, who was born in 1908 and died in 1994 and who was in a higher socioeconomic class, the biggest changes included better schooling in general, more women going to college (the fact that her own business school class included women, for the first time in Spain, was a Huge Deal - now women are the majority in business school), machinery (a great invention), communications (movies, radio, tv), more ease of travel… she lived through multiple changes in the situation of women: Second Republic, Franco’s dictatorship, then Democracy-Again. And unlike my maternal grandma she was very conscious of each of those changes.

Both of them lived through The Hunger Years, first of the Civil War, then the combination of our post-war with the War in Europe, then the isolation years. Both remembered the lunar landing with wonder. Abuelita (paternal) was very much a believer, both in God and in Man: she expected to see many more wonders, including for example “an end to hunger” (her own mention), albeit most of them from Heaven if she made it (which she hoped she would but “it’s like a test in school: you do your best, but you can’t be sure it’s been good enough until they give you the grade”). Yaya (maternal) was a very negative person and never seemed to think very much about the world more than a few yards away; anything for which she could see a direct effect on her was considered, anything for which she did not see a direct effect was discarded from consideration. If you’d asked her about hunger in the world she would have said to shut up and aren’t you going to finish that.

So, two women of similar age, living in the same country and for several years in the same town, but who had very different outlooks. Their differences in their lives weren’t so much of circumstances as of what they themselves made of those circumstances.

8

My dad was much like Yaya, only minding the immediate surroundings/personal impact. He didn’t have much patience for the wonder in the rest of the world/universe.

Space… the moon … (waves his hand, who cares)

What I felt may be related to this innate attitude is that he was also non-nostalgic about the past - no rose colored glasses, even for those magical 50s.

Depression was tough
Gang/neighborhood violence/tension was common where he lived.
Add in more ethnic groups that felt ‘othered’ There was an Irish section, Slavic section, Italian section and male teens could run into trouble moving about town.
Cops are trouble.
Politics - they’re all crooks.

Advances in medicine, supermarkets, TV, good. The lottery.
He kept up through with tech (tvs, cars for him) through the 1970s and then couldn’t adapt much to tech anymore.

9

My husband had a great-aunt (or maybe great-great) who was born in 1898 and lived to be 106 (she died in 2005, I think I have the math right) and who was very sharp right to the end. She thought the time she lived through was very exciting. She liked to remember the good stuff, and she thought going to the moon was the best thing ever, followed by the Jacuzzi. She said she never failed to appreciate hot water on tap.

10

My grandmother was born in 1897 and made it to age 99. She handled the changes fine, maybe better than most people because she’d seen so much change. She remembers seeing an airplane flying for the first time shortly before WWI. She never rode in a car until after the war and she never used a telephone until she came to the US.

11

My dad was born in 1900, technically still in the 1800s, and lived to 1993. He grew up in a town in Missouri, not a big city, so very likely would remember the first automobile or electric light he ever saw. So he literally saw with his own eyes, old enough to remember it, an early prototype of almost every modern technological marvel. By contrast, when I was born in the 1930s, everything was already in wide use, to see daily: Automobiles, airplanes, electric lights, radio, movies, phonograph, refrigeration, air conditioning. Nothing jaw-dropping to be in awe of, only refinements in the pre-existing technology. Lite television and jet planes and diesel rail.

12

I lived for a while in a stone-age society, and one of the things that struck me afterwards was how much the society as orgainsed around walking. It still is in many places, but not so much in the USA.

People walked and played in the roads, which were designed for that purpose. People walked to the shops, which were placed for that purpose. People bought only what they could carry, or had stuff delivered. People grew garden vegitables, because it was less work than buying them. People sat on the porch and talked to people who walked by

I’ve experienced living with oil or gas lamps, and to me it didn’t seem that much of a step to electricity. Possibly the transition from candles was bigger. The disappearance of horses had major effects on society, so I’m sure it had an effect on some individuals, but nobody I’ve ever read or talked to thought it worth mentioning, except I got a subtle sense that older people thought of horses as a normal option for consideration. Just seldom appropriate, after consideration.

13

My late grandfather was born at the tail end of 1900. not 1890, but close. He saw men walk on the moon.

14

You don’t have to go back that far, there are plenty of places in the world that are just turning the corner of that century.

I lived for three months in a village in Bolivia, that was pretty devoid of modernity. There was electrical power, installed about a year before I got there, but only a few pelple were hooked up to it (legally). Those that were just had one or two light bulbs. There was a road, but except for the daily bus each way, I only saw 2 or 3 vehicles on it. There were no private cars in the village or beyond. When there was a power outage, the bus driver would be told, and he would leave a note at the power company. There was no running water. All shopping had to be done on the bus, there was a little store that sold mostly candy, cigarettes, an irregular few food items. If rain washed out the ford across the river in our town, there would be no bus until the men of the community filled it back in by hand with rocks.

That was in 1992, but since then, it has become a known place where hostelers feel welcome and have brought it into a new century:

https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&hl=en&authuser=0&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1010&bih=602&q=rosillas+bolivia&oq=rosillas+bolivia&gs_l=img.12...2565.7478.0.14042.18.17.0.0.0.0.593.2989.0j9j1j1j1j1.13.0....0...1.1.64.img..5.8.1450.0..0j0i10k1j0i5i30k1.aVhoOAqWVk0

Last summer, I rode the bus at dusk from Berbera to Hargeisa, Somalia, and there were no lights in the towns along the way except for a few shops that had a generator and a bulb or two, and maybe a refrigerator in there somewhere. This is on the country’s main and only paved highway, so much more advanced than anywhere else. Hargeisa is a city of over two million, one of the 20 biggest cities in Africa, with only five flights a day in and out of the airport. Raising and exporting camels is the largest sector of the Hargeisa economy. There is a light grid in Hargeisa, and potable water, but only a mile of so of paved streets.

15

Just wanted to say – great thread. Thanks to the OP, Nava, sattua, jtur88 – all of you, really (and the folks you are citing).

16

My grandmother, who was born in 1914, told of the first time she saw an airplane fly over their farm. It scared her so badly she ran and hid in the barn.