Life in the Rear-view Mirror

Technology Revolution

Over two centuries ago, with the advent of the industrial revolution, the world started changing rapidly. But in my own lifetime I experienced an avalanche of change. I was born in a small town in southern Italy, and at that time not all the streets had electricity. Ours was one of them. So, I remember when meals were cooked over a wood oven and dinner was eaten by candlelight. It sounds romantic, but it wasn't. The introduction of electricity was a big improvement. A few years later we traded in our wood stove for a gas one: another significant improvement.

Of course, with no electricity there was no radio or television. I didn't know it then, but we were much better off without them. There were only a few cars in town, and even though the streets weren't designed for them, traffic was not a problem. Life was hard, but relatively peaceful. The technology revolution had bypassed our little town, leaving it in blissful neglect.

For us, refrigerators, radios, and television didn't come until much later, when the family immigrated to Canada, in the late 1950s. It seemed like we had entered a new age. We had hot water and space heating that didn't rely on the fireplace!

The houses on our street were built during the time when space heating was done by coal furnaces and hot-water radiators, so they all had basement windows at the front, where the coal was dumped directly into the basement, and then shovelled daily into the furnaces: big monsters, compared to the high-efficiency gas furnaces we have now.

By the time we got to Toronto, most of them had been converted to oil burning – not only a big environmental advantage, but also a work saver. There was no need to get up in the middle of the night to stoke the furnace.

Although there were many cars in Toronto, traffic congestion and pollution were not problems then. Most houses had a single car garage, and on our street, many of them were empty. We used ours for storage and to make wine. It wasn't until the sixties that homes with two-car garages started appearing. Nowadays, traffic congestion on the city's main arteries, to say nothing of the highways, has reached levels that are very stressful for the daily commuters, not to mention the problems of air and noise pollution. The changes from the early days have been dramatic.

Inside the house, up to the 1960s, the kitchen was a pretty simple place, with gas stove, refrigerator, and toaster. The microwave oven came much later, as did the electric eggbeater, the blender, food processor, the juicer, and numerous other electrical and non-electrical contraptions, which required natural resources to make. Kitchens have grown in size, just to accommodate all the new appliances and gadgets.

The laundry room of the sixties was also simple, comprising of washtubs and clotheslines. Then came the washing machine with the wringer – two rollers that squeezed the water from the clothes one at a time. It was eventually replaced by the dryer, a very energy-intensive machine, and the clotheslines virtually disappeared. Very few people nowadays hang clothes to dry outside during good weather, taking advantage of the free energy from the sun and the wind. We are the exception in our neighbourhood.

Then, in the 1980s, the computer started entering into the home, and there was no looking back. In those days, very few homes had computers. The printer and fax machine, which doubled as a copying machine, followed the computer into the home. Nowadays, almost every house has a computer and many have more than one. Cell phones, spawned by computer technology, also made their way into the home. Their rise in popularity was explosive. Within a decade, almost everybody had at least one cell phone. 

A similar revolution happened outside the house. When my family first arrived in Toronto, the lawns were mowed with manual mowers, hedges were trimmed with hand shears, and cuttings were raked by hand. Nowadays, power mowers, trimmers, and blowers are de rigueur. Those still doing it the old-fashioned way are frowned upon as relics from an ancient past. And for the handyman there is the electric drill, the jig saw, power saw, electric sander, and power water sprayer, just to name a few.

Electric power and the combustion engine now do every thing that was done by hand fifty years ago. Many are time savers and effective to do the job, but some are mere energy wasters. In any case, the quiet neighbourhood has practically disappeared.

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