THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9412290069
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: SENTINELS OF THE CENTURY
From the horse and buggy to the lunar landing
SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Short : 41 lines
FIVE YEARS OUT from the turn of the century - or six, as some calendar pedants would have it - anticipation builds about the coming of the year 2000. It is not just the change of a century, but the end of a millennium, the great turning of the astral odometer.
Already, futurists tell us what profound change is to be expected in the 21st century and how it will affect our lives. An edginess accompanies any reading of their predictions, a twinge of fear for the unknown.
For comfort in facing a time of great change, it is better to talk to someone who has experienced it. And the people with the most experience, those born in the last century, in the 1800s, are still among us. Their numbers are dwindling, just over 250,000 in America, but a great many of them are clear in their memory of what they have encountered, and optimistic about what lies ahead.
No generation of human beings endured so much change as the generation born in the late 1800s. In a single lifetime, in an eyelash-blink of history, they moved easily from riding a horse and wagon - technology that had changed little in 2,000 years - to travel by automobile, then by propeller plane, jet aircraft. They lived to see men walk on the moon. As children, a colored crayon was a marvel; now, color pictures beam off satellites into their homes, and the children of the 1890s adapt to it with ease.
To no other generation has such profound scientific and sociological change been so integral a part of their lives. And, among them, the happiest are those who allowed change to work to their advantage, those who may have grown old but never allowed themselves to become old-fashioned.
There is something to be learned from what they have to say. by CNB