"Looking Backward"

 This is an enormous (dare I say huge?) subject, and, in under 600 words, I have only touched on a few aspects of how the creativity and inventiveness of a few individuals have radically improved our lives over the past 150 years. I suspect many of you have had similar thoughts, especially those of you who were fortunate to know your grandparents.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Looking Backward”

April 6, 2025

 

“Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight,

Make me a child again just for tonight!”

                                                                                                                “Rock Me to Sleep,” 1859 

                                                                                                                Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911)

 

The future holds my attention, but as I get older I spend more time looking backward. While historians look to the past to gain insights for the future, I look back – mostly at my paternal grandfather – to better understand the world of 150 years ago and contrast it with the one in which I grew up (and am still growing up). While the history of man, through written records, can be traced back 5,000 years to civilizations in Egypt and what is now Iraq, it constantly amazes me to realize how much our material lives have changed in just the past 150 years. 

 

Fortune favored me, in that I knew all my grandparents, though my maternal grandfather died when I was six. But my paternal grandfather, who was born in February 1873, died in 1963 when I was twenty-two. I knew him well, and because we shared the same name I always felt a special kinship.

 

But the circumstances in which we were born reflect a vastly changed America. When he was born, the United States had a population of 40 million. Alexander Graham Bell had yet to invent the telephone, which he did in 1876. And he was nine when Thomas Edison opened the nation’s first commercial power plant, the Pearl Street Station, in New York City. The first commercially available automobile, the Duryea Wagon, would not be offered for sale until 1896 when he was two years out of college. He was thirty when the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first paved road in the U.S. appeared on a one-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue in Detroit in 1909 when my grandfather was thirty-six. And it would be 1935, when he was sixty-two, before one could travel from New York City to San Francisco on a paved highway, the Lincoln Highway. 

 

By the time I was born, the population of the U.S. had more than tripled to 132 million. Thirty-six percent of households had telephones and 75% had electricity. The number of cars on American roads were about 34 million and able to drive on 320,000 miles of paved highways. By 1953, airlines were flying non-stop commercial flights across the U.S.

 

War was more of a constant for my grandfather than for me. The February 15, 1898 sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor, shortly after my grandfather’s 23^rd birthday was the catalyst for the Spanish American War. He joined the Massachusetts Militia but never went to Cuba. Sixty-four years later I joined the U.S. Army Reserves, a year or so before our entry into the Vietnam War. He was forty-one when World War I broke out and sixty-eight when the U.S. entered World War II. His three sons and two sons-in-law served in the War, one of whom was wounded at Okinawa.  

 

Time moves on, and my grandchildren’s lives will be different (and probably improved) from mine, in ways we can only guess. Readers will note that the title of this essay comes from Edward Bellamy’s 1888 eponymous utopian novel. The difference being that Bellamy’s principal character, Julian West, is looking backward from a futuristic world he can only envision, while I look backward on a life I have lived.