Today
Annie Oakley was 43.
Mark Twain was 68.
Wyatt Earp was 55 and living in Los Angeles.
Scott Joplin was 35.
Louis Armstrong was 3 and it would be another decade before he picked up a trumpet.
Albert Einstein, an obscure physicist working on his Ph.D., was a patent examiner in Switzerland.
President Theodore Roosevelt had recently proposed the construction of a canal in Panama.
A mechanic in Detroit set up a manufacturing firm, which he named after himself: the Ford Motor Company.
Neither the North Pole nor the South Pole had been reached.
Charles Lindbergh was 1.
James Doolittle, who was to lead his Raiders to Tokyo 39 years later, was 7.
Igor Sikorsky, who developed the helicopter, was 14 and living in Russia.
Chuck Yeager's birth was 20 years away, Neil Armstrong's 27.
This was the world, 100 years ago today. It was a thoroughly old-fashioned world at the moment of becoming a thoroughly modern one. A hinge was turning, a blade was moving, although hardly anyone was there to see it. A 25-mile per hour wind blew, which made the 40-degree temperature feel more like 30. Think of the steady wind blowing in off the cold surf, and two brothers, one running in the sand, the other, fitfully, in the air.
K-
And my grandmother was about to have her first birthday.
Kem, this post is almost poetic! How very well written. My paternal grandfather was 13 and my paternal grandmother was 7. My maternal grandmother was 3 and my maternal grandfather was somewhere between 5 and 10 (I don't recall his birthdate at the moment).
Isn't it amazing how much has changed in the last 100 years? Just imagine where we might be 100 from now!
Kem, what a great way to put things into perspective. Truly amazing.
Flight was an important modern innovation of the 20th century. It's interesting to consider it in light of other things going on at the time.
K-