Technological changes in communication and transportation affected our economy enormously in the last century. My mother died Christmas afternoon at age 90, and experiences from her life drive home the impacts of such change on our society.
When Mom was born in 1913, her parents sent letters to their families in Holland. Few Minnesota farms had telephones and intercontinental telephony did not exist. They could have sent a cable from the train depot in Chandler, but the cost would have been enormous for farmers struggling on 80 acres. Letters had to go by ship. Charles Lindbergh, four years younger than mom’s eventual husband, was in grade school.
When she died, a few quick taps on a computer keyboard sent word to her grandson in Belgium, a hundred miles south of his family’s ancestral village, in a matter of seconds at no apparent cost. Another grandson’s wife can talk to her family in Mexico City for pennies a minute.
Even after years of toil on the farm, Mom’s folks never could afford a return visit to the “old country.” Her grandson in Belgium thinks little of flying back to a friend’s wedding in New York — it involves hours rather than weeks of travel and if you look for cheap flights on the Internet, costs only a few days’ pay.
Her birth preceded the outbreak of war by less than a year. One of her earliest memories, from when she was just 5, was of hearing a steam locomotive chug through the valley west of Chandler with its whistle shrieking continuously. The whistle told rural residents an armistice had been signed. All along the route — Fulda, Iona, Chandler, Edgerton, Hatfield, Pipestone — people knew what it meant. Their sons would return home. All but one Chandler boy did.
Again, farms had no telephones and Rural Free Delivery was in its infancy. When Mom’s parents went to town to sell cream or to buy supplies they picked up accumulated mail, perhaps including weekly newspapers from Edgerton or Slayton. Mom’s own mother, always interested in public affairs, scanned Twin Cities newspapers in the lobby of the Chandler hotel, even if they were a week old.
If I sit at my cousin’s computer, in the farmhouse where Mom grew up, I can read my favorite newspapers from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or Lima, Peru, before they even hit the streets. Chandler has not had a hotel for decades.
One was necessary in 1913 because no paved roads reached the town or most other Minnesota towns. If traveling salesmen came in on a train, they might not be able to leave until the next day. Every road out of Chandler now is paved, which is good, since all the area’s grain must leave by truck since the tracks were torn up 25 years ago. Yet the town’s grain storage today, in the elevators and bins along where the tracks used to be, is perhaps 10 times as great as it was in 1913.
Then one could buy a ticket at the Chandler depot and ride the train to virtually any other town in the nation, though it might take days. Only a few hundred U.S. cities have any passenger train service today.
Telephones eventually reached the farm when Mom was a child, but long-distance calling was expensive through so much of her life that she never was comfortable with extended conversations. Her children and grandchildren yak for hours.
The first great era of migration and globalization was ending in 1913, but one could hear five languages on the streets of Chandler. Virtually no one speaks Dutch, Norwegian or German anymore, but you can hear Spanish, Hmong and perhaps Somali when workers leaving the afternoon shift at the beef jerky plant pick up milk and bread in Chandler’s grocery.
Mom was sightseeing in Manhattan, on a pass from Navy basic training, in July 1945 when an Army bomber slammed into the Empire State Building. In the era before inertial navigation systems, GPS receivers or Honeywell ring-laser gyros, clouds combined with a small compass error or poorly compensated drift could put the pilot of even a new plane into harm’s way in seconds.
Her friends back on base were frantic because they thought she was going to the building that was hit. They waited in fear for hours. Today they would just flip open their cell phones and speed dial to verify her safety. By 1945, news of deaths was communicated by telegram and, with some effort, one could make a scratchy long-distance call between most points in the United States.
When my mother was born, people in North America and Europe argued that modern technology, the telegraph and steam engines, had “annihilated time and space.” We now scoff at their naivete. Will our grandchildren scoff at us, and how will their economy and society be different in 2093?
© 2004 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.