The flip side of this question is if you, personally, would want to do the reverse given that you could move your entire family at their current age and go back to 1959 but you have any special technological knowledge about the future at all once you make the move. I am pretty sure I could make it just fine but I don’t know if I would want to at all. I don’t want to hijack this thread but I think a 2009 person would have a much easier time of it in 1959 than the reverse but I could be wrong.
The awful traffic, so many more highways, and two cars (or more) per family. When driving through the original village here on the way to the suburbs, there are hundreds of little teeny houses built (for factory workers?) after WWII, and they all have a little teeny garage for the one-car family. … Ordinary people flying to vacation in Europe. More ethnic/exotic food, like Thai and Indian, not just in big cities…And, of course, the price of everything.
The sheer amount and breadth and uncontrolled nature of information available on the Internet would be more shocking than the technology itself, I think. Information technology in general too; we don’t think anything of being able to carry a giant collection of music in our pocket.
I kinda’ wonder what our person from 1959 would think of the styles of cars these days.
Even up close (in many cases), trying to tell a Ford from a Chevy might seem perplexing.
In the late 1960’s my mother was the first person in the administrative offices at a local hospital to wear a pansuit to work. It was appoved, with much discussion, but someone was afraid that the trend would turn toward people wearing pajama like garments to work. My mom said, “More likely women will start wearing suits like men, or jeans to work.”
Mom was right, in the first and second example, but fast forward 40 years and a lot of women wear pajama pants, not to work, but to go shopping and everything else.
So women wearing pants was still a big deal in 1959,
As others have said I think the change in social mores might be the most shocking. If as Shagnasty said, I was transported back 50 years I would miss the internet and a lot of technological changes (think wringer-washer instead of front-load automatic!) but I’d have a lot more problems fitting in as a woman who came of age after the advances of civil rights and the women’s movement, with gay friends and so forth. I’d be a shocked whisper divorcee, and my son might be taken from me because I am “living in sin” with another man.
Also, people live longer, and have better teeth.
You’re right. Was indoor air fresh anywhere? There were ash trays in theater lobbies but not in the theater itself. What about churches? Ash trays by the outside door but not inside? I can’t remember.
panache45, good point about the Soviet Union. In 1959 I was pretty sure it would either expand even more or that there would be some kind of war. Not that 14-year-olds think very deeply about stuff like that.
I’d probably be surprised that Fidel Castro lasted so long.
Well, I am from 1959, and nothing anybody has said so far has ever surprised me.
What DOES!!! surprise me, and still surprises me, is the population explosion.
We now have over 100 million extra people here in America. There are crowds everywhere, traffic, congestion, people in lines, road rage, pollution, energy shortages, water shortages, job shortages, etc. and none of these were part of the scene in 1959.
On top of that, what surprises me even more, is that after adding over 100 million people in the past 50 years, the United States is now the fastest growing country in the world, and it is now immigrating millions more additional people each year.
Why the heck do we need more people?
Are there that many jobs that employers cannot find anybody to apply for?
Do we still have empty states and empty land that need to be homesteaded?
What is the deal with everyone wanting overpopulation?
I think a big shock would be the LACK of space travel.
1959 was right after the dawn of the “Space Age” and I think at the time a lot of people assumed that our expansion into space would be very rapid. When 2001: A Space Odyssey was made 9 years later, it was still pretty reasonable to believe that we’d have regular commuter rockets to Earth orbit and a large permanent moon base by the turn of the century.
I vote for the Internet as well. Computers would be a shock, but the Internet is more probably be more of a shock. Cell phones would come close, but smart phones with access to the web would be more so, I think.
Some good points especially about the disappointment over the lack of progress in many areas particularly transportation: no flying cars and space travel is still very rare. Forget the average man; if you had asked a bunch of futurists in 1959 to predict the future they would have probably over-estimated the technological changes and underestimated the social and cultural ones.
The one exception is the combination of personal computers, Internet and mobile devices which has evolved in the last 30 years. This is the one broad area where technological change has kept pace with and even outpaced expectations.It might be fun to start a sister thread about it.
I think a lot depends on the type of 2009 person you’re talking about. I’m a straight white guy, so I think I could manage, but I’d hate to have to do it if I were female, or gay, or black.
I’d miss the internet a lot, but probably the hardest adjustment would be relations between the sexes. I like living in a world where women are expected to be strong and independent and it would be very difficult to try to adapt to the huge inequality that was the norm back then.
I think the biggest shock at first would the the technological advances. Then after living here a bit, the societal changes.
“No wonder this circuit failed, it says made in Japan.”
“What do you mean, Doc, all the best stuff is made in Japan.”
“You mean you still use coal power plants? Where are all the nuclear power plants? Was all the plutonium used in the Atomic Wars?”
“Why did that uppity negro glower at me when I told him to shine my shoes?”
“I told that woman in the man-pants to get me a cup of coffee, and she told me to get it myself. What nerve!”
Also, I have a 50’s anachronism from reading too much sci-fi. I call women ‘girls’ even though it’s frowned upon in some circles. Sure the 50’s were over decades before I was born, but I just can’t help it.
Non smoking sections didn’t exist in 1959 - in fact, they’d probably find it shocking and amazing that smoking everywhere in public is no longer socially acceptable. I’m younger than 1959, but I remember when the air indoors was always slightly hazy and they used to have ashtrays in elevators and public bathroom stalls.
A black man as President would definitely be mind-blowing. Hell, it would be mind-blowing to someone from 1989, much less 1959.
Gay marriage existing at all, anywhere.
Greatly decreased tolerance of drinking and the crackdown on drunk driving, mandatory seatbelts in cars (in 1959 I believe they were still an option you had to ask for and pay extra for) and airbags just didn’t exist, neither did automatic doorlocks, remote starter, or GPS navigation.
The popularity and acceptance of tattoos and piercing would be shocking, even horrifying, as would the greatly increased tolerance of homosexuals such that more than one sitting member of Congress is not only out, but reelected after coming out. (Yes, I realize anti-homosexual bigotry still exists, but it’s not like it was in 1959). Women wearing pants daily as a matter of course and not just when an occupation demands it. Enforced equal pay rules in the workplace.
Attitudes towards sex and reproduction - the contraceptive pill was not available in 1959, it came out in 1960. Adds for women’s contraception on TV, adds for viagra, condoms talked about in public, in vitro fertilization, none of that existed in 1959. Pre-natal testing didn’t exist, neither did ultrasounds, no one knew the gender of a baby before birth and often enough twins weren’t discovered until the actual day of birth.
A LOT of modern medicine, and attitudes towards it: organ donation, for example, only existed between identical twins and even then it was extraordinarily rare. Re-attachment of severed limbs did not exist. Medical imaging like CAT and MRI did not exist. Smallpox is gone by the 1970’s, but in 1959 it still killed a million or two people a year. In 1959 handicapped people were not accommodated - all those handicapped parking spots, ramps, and adaptive equipment we take for granted will be a surprise. People walking - even running - with C-legs. Cochlear implants allowing the deaf to hear.
Air travel is no longer glamorous but rather on par with bus service. PamAm and TWA are long gone. You go through a metal detector and a search process prior to boarding a commercial flight (the metal detectors weren’t brought in until the 1970’s, if I recall).
Genetic engineering of anything.
Ubiquitous computers and microchips everywhere.
The internet.
No flying cars
People other than the fabulously wealthy can own copies of movies and watch them at home any time.
Cellphones.
Ah, remember those vacuum tube testers that used to be in stores? Your TV wasn’t working, you pulled out tubes that might be bad, took them to the store, and used the tester.
Actually, satellite TV might be more surprising than cable. When I lived in West Virginia in 1969 the family had cable TV (the broadcast stuff wouldn’t clear the mountains, you either had cable or nothing), it probably wouldn’t be quite so surprising to Mr. 1959, but satellite TV? Televsision went into space and mankind stayed home? 
I don’t think the importance of entertainment in the computer/space technology of today was foreseen. We use space for beaming TV around the world, computers to make movies, and we play GAMES on computers! In fact there are computer systems designed to do nothing BUT play games! In 1959 computers were hideously expensive, filled entire rooms or even buildings, and were used for Important Stuff like science and the military.
I could cope, as long as I was allowed to have ‘a girl’ come in twice a week to do the cleaning. I already cook, sew and can do without all the convenience foods. We would be considered slightly odd because we would be avoiding the new convenience foods - but I grew up in the era of sunday dinner being one of a small selection of roasts of various animals after church, and monday being leftovers from sunday, wednesday being prince spaghetti night and friday was always fish [town was predominately catholic] and I already have the old cookbooks [I have my moms cookbook collection of almost 400, about 10 of them come from the 50s when she was the young and developing hosuewife]
We even have the great reason for liking exotic foods, mrAru spent 20 years in the navy … military often brought back odd food habits =)
Come to think of it, sexual harassment laws.
Plastic plastic plastic plastic plastic freaking EVERYWHERE! It wasn’t an unknown substance in 1959, but zillions of things that used to be made of glass or metal or cardboard are now made from plastic.
Chain restaurants. Ray Kroc’s MacDonalds had been around since 1955 but who knew it would be the model for damn near every type of food joint? Some towns don’t even have any remaining NON-chain eateries.
Minor but quirky surprise: no automats. Hey, we had 'em in 1959 and you folks don’t? Live people selling food, everywhere. The only food in machines is snack food in those vending machines. (Wow, you can stick a paper dollar in there? It knows?)
One thing the '59 time-traveller would eventually be struck by is the shift from mechanical devices to ones governed by electronics and microchips. It’s a massive difference, but a bit more subtle than some that have been mentioned. There was a time when everything had moving, mechanical parts inside. You could open things up, look inside and see the gringe-valve, the clamp-flange regulator and the plonk-sluice, and if you knew what you were doing you fix it or tinker with it. Now when you open things up, you just see miniature motherboards and printed circuits, and maybe an LED or two.
Clean air would be a massive and very conspicuous difference, and it’s something we kind of take for granted when in fact we should feel a great sense of collective pride about what we’ve achieved.
Mass media and entertainment have changed so incredibly that it would take a while to absorb the technology leap. We still have the tapes so we can see what even broadcast quality TV looked like in 1959: lengthy single camera shots, low definition and low contrast images, far from perfect audio fidelity and so on. Look at a major sports broadcast today: 30 different camera views available inlcuding shots from the sky and ‘Steadicam’ shots from the touchline, widescreen, hi-def, perfect sound quality, fast inter-cutting between shots, real-time signal and digital processing (zoom, picture in picture, overlays), immediate action replay and so on.
On a more sombre note, I think the time-traveller would be dismayed to see that we still haven’t figured out how to make sure everyone in the world at least has food and water, even though the wealth is there, and that wars are still part of life.
Color TV started in 1953. Although not many people had a color set until well into the 60s. And because not many people had color sets not many shows were broadcast in color.
The internet. How do you explain that you can research anything from anywhere?
Do your banking, pay your bills. And if you have the where with all, purchase pretty much anything and have it shipped to your house in a day or two.
GPS. Find anything from anywhere. Don’t even need to know the name of the business. Want to find the closest Thai restaurant? No prob.
Thai restaurants for that mater. Or the diversity in restaurants in general
Smart phones. A long distance phone call was a big deal in 1959. Now we don’t bat an eye. Take a picture and send it to your Aunt Martha and she receives it and views it even though she may be miles from home. And the sender, doesn’t even know where she is.