Frightening modern technology in turn-of-the-century Phoenix


As someone who will often use the phrase "Welcome to the 21st Century!" when someone does something like using a cell phone for the first time, I often think about how frightening it was to be in old-time Phoenix when the century changed from the 1800s to the 1900s. Let's time-travel back to Phoenix at the turn of the century.

Now calm down here, you know that I love Phoenix, but it's never exactly been the first place for technology to happen. People were using electricity, and driving cars, long before any of that made its way out to Phoenix. But Phoenix has always had a tradition of embracing progressive thinking, so things caught on fast there. There would have been, of course, people who weren't too thrilled with the latest technology. I'm interested in what they would have had to say.

The first thing that I think of is electricity. When it came to Phoenix, near the end of the 1800s, you have to realize that a lot of people could still remember the Civil War. Then, as now, people who are perfectly comfortable with a particular old style of technology can be reluctant to even consider using the new "tech". Before electricity, people used daylight, or fire, or gas (well, I guess that's fire), and it must have just looked absolutely crazy to see the center of town lit up with electricity. Speaking for myself, I would have stood pretty far back. Nobody knew! Turns out that it was a good technology, that didn't kill too many people, but what if there had been invisible radioactive rays? That caused cancer? Nobody knew!

And "horseless carriages" must have been extremely hard to take. Nowadays we call them "cars" or even "automobiles" - but they were first called by a name that people could understand - a carriage without a horse. Now that had to be crazy to see for the first time! Of course there had been photos in newspapers and magazines for years, but the first one in Phoenix arrived in 1902. That's Dr. Swetnam up there posing proudly, at 2nd Avenue and Washington.

Of course, Phoenix didn't just go from horses and bonfires to automobiles and electricity - that's not how new technologies work. There were steam locomotives, and gas lights, and just like today the technologies overlap. I know some people who have an old-fashioned phone that plugs into their wall, right now, as I write this! And there are people who read their news on paper "newspapers" even though they could get it on their cell phone, or tablet. So it isn't as if everybody just woke up one morning in Phoenix and switched from the old technology to the new one. Nothing much happened on January 1st, 1900, when the century turned. Just like nothing much happened on January 1st of 2000. I saw 2000, and I can imagine 1900.

Thank you for time-traveling with me!

Image at the top of this post: the first car in Phoenix, Arizona, 1902. That's Dr. Swetnam, and you're at 2nd Avenue and Washington, looking east.
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more