From today’s vantage, the first decade of the twentieth century can look like an even more distant period of history than it is. In many corners of urban civilization, the cabarets, tearooms, and other near-paralytically mannered institutions of the Belle Époque were very much going concerns. To those who lived in that era, it must have been easy enough to believe that the ways of nineteenth-century-style aristocracy and empire could perpetuate themselves forever. Yet those were also the years of Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune, the Wright brothers’ first flight; the proliferation of automobiles and subway trains; Russia’s loss in war to Japan and first revolution; Einstein’s discovery of relativity, the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion; and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
The world as it was, in other words, was giving way to the world as it would be. Such is the context of the documentary footage collected — and colorized, and upscaled — in the video at the top of the post. Beginning in a bustling working-class street in Hollinwood, England, this tour of the nineteen-hundreds continues on to places like Spain, India, China, New York, Japan, Brazil, Denmark, Austria, and Germany.
One aspect of all this footage liable to catch the twenty-first-century eye is all the myriad forms of transportation on display, some running on solely animal or even human muscle, and others propelled by the kind of engines then at the heart of industrial revolutions the world over. (You can even catch a glimpse of Wuppertal’s suspended Schwebebahn, previously featured here on Open Culture.)
All this gives us a clearer sense of why so many contemporary observers expressed feelings of civilizational whiplash, especially if, as was becoming more and more common, they’d emigrated from a less technologically advanced society to a more technologically advanced one. For those living at the edge of progress, the shape of things to come (a phrase later used as a book title by one such observer, the prolific H. G. Wells) was anyone’s guess, and it’s hardly surprising that so many forward-looking philosophies, ideologies, and art movements would arise from such a ferment. Still, it would have taken a prescient mind indeed to foresee the ascendance of communism, Nazism, the American empire, and mass broadcast media just ahead, to say nothing of two world wars. William Gibson had yet to be born, let alone to utter his now-famous quote, but as we can see, the future was already here in the nineteen-tens — and unevenly distributed.
Related content:
Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: London, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More
Paris Had a Moving Sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison Film Captured It in Action
Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911
Berlin Street Scenes Beautifully Caught on Film (1900–1914)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
