The average educational level was fifth-grade. It had gotten that high because of a major program to reduce illiteracy in nineteenth century America. Five to seven children were the norm, with birth control not yet in sight. A picture of New York's Lower East Side shows flat-topped straw hats and caps to be very popular. Bowler hats are also in the picture. There are numerous parked dray wagons piled high with produce, and a couple of horse-drawn wagons coming down the street. Can you imagine how aromatic that must have been, with all those horses plying the highways and byways? Women are dressed from  toes to nose. (There's one woman in the picture whose calf is exposed!)

     Until next year, Queen Victoria will still preside over the the empire on which the sun never sets. Electricity is spreading from big cities to towns. Indoor plumbing is just beginning to appear in urban areas. Everything is powered by steam, since the internal combustion engine is still in its infancy. Black coal smoke is everywhere (as it was in the 30's). There are electric streetlights, and possibly electric lights in the home. There are 855,300 telephones for 78,000,000 people. The first crude movies are on display in New York City. Outside of town—and 60% of all Americans lived on farms—there would have been no electric pumps, no refrigerators, no fans, no electric lights, and no telephones. The plumbing would have consisted of a hand pump and an outhouse. (You wonder why they didn't mount a large glass bottle overhead, where it could be filled and could provide water to a sink.) Even in town, many households kept chickens, and for all I know, a cow, along with the horse(s) in their stable. (Yesterday, across from Karen and Shannon's house at 10th Avenue and 14th street here in Huntsville, I heard a rooster crowing.) The tree-lined streets in small towns were paved with brick, cinders, oil and tar, or dirt. Every house had a hitching post. There may have been black-enameled screen-door screens, and fly paper. There were livery stables. We can still see the buildings and the houses from 1900, and here and there, we can still find old-timey hardware stores that capture the essence of that era. There were ticker tapes, and there was the Western Union, with its bicycle-riding messenger boys. 
    Airplanes haven't been invented yet. Dr. Simon Newcomb, the U. S.' "astronomer-royal" at Harvard had"proven" that heavier-than-air aircraft were impossible, or at least impractical. Dr. Samuel Langley, with funds from the Smithsonian, had built several heavier-than-air aircraft and they had failed ignominiously, the last one having been launched off a houseboat in the Potomac River, only to drop immediately to the bottom of the river. Perhaps inspired by various inventors' failed flying machines, the satirical poem, "Darius Green and His Flying Machine" was popular at that time. Practical heavier-than-air flying machines were held to be impossible in the eyes of the general public.
    Radio was still in the proof-of-principle stage. However, a ship in distress in the Sumatra Strait had used wireless to send an S. O. S. , and hadbeen rescued because of it.

The Good Old Days
   Children were still working in the mills. These were the good old days. There would have been a bandstand, and parades up Main Street on the Fourth of July. The Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review of Literature would have arrived in the mail for Saturday-night reading. The Sears Roebuck catalog was a wonderful thing to dream on out there on the prairie. One-room country schoolhouses would have been common, although we know that Willoughby had a full school system in that era. Travel was by steam train, steamship, horse-and-buggy, bicycle, and Shank's Mare. Heating must have been supplied by coal, in the form of ornate coal stoves in parlors, coal convection furnaces, and steam and hot-water radiator heating. Water was heated either around the furnace or with gas hot water heaters. And of course, we know what it was like in the thirties. But there must have been a lot of changes between 1900 and 1932.

                              Papa carves the Sunday roast for wife, daughters, and sons-in-law, circa 1910.
 
 

A Boy's Life in 1900
 
 

    Prior to the 20th century, virtually all scientific progress was made at universities, and virtually all technological progress was made by individual inventors, who usually lived in garrets and died penniless and despondent. These men were self-educated in the "school of hard knocks". Professors were considered windy incompetents. Thomas Edison loved to harass the college-educated man, since he wasn't one himself. (Nikola Tesla, who applied his college-trained mind to inventions, ran rings around Edison, but lacked the financial muscle and the reputation to overthrow the domineering Edison). In 1900, most university graduates were the (often-spoiled) scions of the well-to-do. In the U. S., it wasn't until after World War II that the G. I. bill opened the college doors for average individuals. 
    The first half of the 20th century saw the rise of team and of corporate research, including some government laboratories. (Germany pioneered in this team research in the latter years of the 19th century.) The science fiction of the 30's has individual inventors pitted against corporate octopi, with the greedy corporations trying to steal the inventors' ideas. Howev er, the team research approach proved its mettle in World War II. Germany stunned the world with the inventions that spewed forth from its laboratories, and the Allies weren't far behind. After World War II, the world was sold for a time on basic, as well as applied, research. It still is, but perhaps not as strongly as in the 20 years following WWII.