The Roaring Twenties
Science And Technology
The 1920s were an age of dramatic social and political change. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society.” People from coast to coast bought the same goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of chain stores), listened to the same music, did the same dances and even used the same slang! Many Americans were uncomfortable with this new, urban, sometimes racy “mass culture”; in fact, for many–even most–people in the United States, the 1920s brought more conflict than celebration. However, for a small handful of young people in the nation’s big cities, the 1920s were roaring indeed.
The “New Woman” The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. They could vote at last: The 19 amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920. Millions of women worked in white-collar jobs and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children. And new machines and technologies like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgery of household work.
The Birth of Mass Culture During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the U.S., Pittsburgh’s KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920; three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households. People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week. But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers’ needs.
The Jazz Age Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them “bedrooms on wheels.”) What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom, the flea hop. Jazz bands played at dance halls like the Savoy in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s “vulgarity” and “depravity” (and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.
Prohibition During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any “intoxication beverages” with more than 0.5% alcohol. This drove the liquor trade underground–now, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of ordinary bars–where it was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized-crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago’s police force on his payroll.) To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation’s cities. For instance, to the so-called “Drys,” beer was known as “Kaiser brew.” Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time.
The “Cultural Civil War” Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people in places like Indiana and Illiones joined the Ku Ku Klan in the 1920s. To them, the Klan represented a return to all the “values” that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling.
Likewise, an anti-Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist, or anti-immigrant, hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example). These conflicts–what one historian has called a “cultural Civil War” between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, blacks and whites, “New Women” and advocates of old-fashioned family values–are perhaps the most important part of the story of the Roaring Twenties.
The “New Woman” The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. They could vote at last: The 19 amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920. Millions of women worked in white-collar jobs and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children. And new machines and technologies like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgery of household work.
The Birth of Mass Culture During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the U.S., Pittsburgh’s KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920; three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households. People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week. But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers’ needs.
The Jazz Age Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them “bedrooms on wheels.”) What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom, the flea hop. Jazz bands played at dance halls like the Savoy in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s “vulgarity” and “depravity” (and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.
Prohibition During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any “intoxication beverages” with more than 0.5% alcohol. This drove the liquor trade underground–now, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of ordinary bars–where it was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized-crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago’s police force on his payroll.) To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation’s cities. For instance, to the so-called “Drys,” beer was known as “Kaiser brew.” Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time.
The “Cultural Civil War” Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people in places like Indiana and Illiones joined the Ku Ku Klan in the 1920s. To them, the Klan represented a return to all the “values” that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling.
Likewise, an anti-Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist, or anti-immigrant, hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example). These conflicts–what one historian has called a “cultural Civil War” between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, blacks and whites, “New Women” and advocates of old-fashioned family values–are perhaps the most important part of the story of the Roaring Twenties.
The 1920's was a prolific period for new inventions and improvements to existing technology, that had a major impact on the way people lived.
Many of the household items that we take for granted today were either invented or developed into viable commercial products in the 1920's. Labor saving, entertainment and comfort enhancing items like electric irons, toasters, refrigerators, air-conditioners, radio, television and vacuum cleaners, were just a few. It is hard for us to imagine today the excitement generated when marvels of modern science like radio and television were first demonstrated to the general public. These were new and exciting times. Whole new industries and employment opportunities opened up to manufacture goods for the rapidly expanding retail market fueled by easy consumer credit in the form of instalment payment plans.
Liquid Rockets & Iron Lung
Liquid rockets were developed in 1926 and the first flight of a vehicle powered by a liquid rocket was in March 16, 1926 at Massachusetts. A Liquid rocket is a rocket with an engine that uses propellants in liquid form. The liquid propellants are desirable because their reasonably high density allows the volume and hence the mass of the tanks. Robert Goddard made the liquid rocket and used liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellants to developed it. Philip Drinker developed the Iron lung in the 1920s; An Iron Lung is a machine that enables a person to breathe when normal muscle control has been lost. The first iron lung was used in late 1928 at Children’s Hospital, Boston, for a child unconscious from respiratory failure. Overall the science and technology was important in 1920s because they help people a lot in life. Life was easier with the radio, Videophone, liquid rocket and iron lungs.
Liquid rockets were developed in 1926 and the first flight of a vehicle powered by a liquid rocket was in March 16, 1926 at Massachusetts. A Liquid rocket is a rocket with an engine that uses propellants in liquid form. The liquid propellants are desirable because their reasonably high density allows the volume and hence the mass of the tanks. Robert Goddard made the liquid rocket and used liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellants to developed it. Philip Drinker developed the Iron lung in the 1920s; An Iron Lung is a machine that enables a person to breathe when normal muscle control has been lost. The first iron lung was used in late 1928 at Children’s Hospital, Boston, for a child unconscious from respiratory failure. Overall the science and technology was important in 1920s because they help people a lot in life. Life was easier with the radio, Videophone, liquid rocket and iron lungs.
Liquid Rocket Engine
Winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics
-1920 Charles Edouard Guillaume "in recognition of the service he has rendered to precision measurements in Physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys"
-1921 Albert Einstein (Germany) "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his explanation of the photoelectric effect"
-1922 Niels Henrik David Bohr (Denmark) "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them"
-1923 Robert Andrews Millikan (US) "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect"
-1924 Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn "for his discoveries and research in the field of X-ray spectroscopy"
-1925 James Franck and Gustav Ludwig Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom"
-1926 Jean Baptiste Perrin "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter, and especially for his discovery of sedimentation equilibrium"
-1927 Arthur Holly Compton (US) "for his discovery of the effect named after him".
-1927 Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (Scotland) "for his method of making the paths of electrically charged particles visible by condensation of vapour".
-1928 Owen Willans Richardson "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him"
-1929 Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (France) "for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons".
Albert Einstein
Quotes
-The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
-Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
-If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
-The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
-Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
-If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
-The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
What Did Albert Einstein Invent?
Albert Einstein, a man whose name is practically synonymous with genius, is one of history's greatest thinkers. As a physicist and mathematician, Einstein wasn't an inventor in the vein of Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, but his theories of relativity led to new ways of looking at time, space, matter, energy and gravity. His work led to important advances such as the control of atomic energy, space exploration, and applications of light.
As a young boy born to Jewish parents in Germany, his teachers initially called him slow and lazy. However, by the time he left school at the age of 15, one teacher remarked there was nothing left to teach him.
As a young boy born to Jewish parents in Germany, his teachers initially called him slow and lazy. However, by the time he left school at the age of 15, one teacher remarked there was nothing left to teach him.
Topic Einstein Published
- Brownian movement, or the zigzag motion of microscopic particles in suspension. Einstein's findings helped to prove the existence of atoms and molecules.
- The quantum theory of light. Einstein proposed that light is composed of separate packets of energy, called -- quanta or photons -- that have some properties of particles and some properties of waves. He also explained the photoelectric effect, which is the emission of electrons from some solids when they're struck by light. Television is a practical application of Einstein's theory of light.
- The special theory of relativity. Einstein explained that time and motion are relative to their observers -- as long as the speed of light remains constant and natural laws are the same throughout the universe.
- The link between mass and energy. The fourth paper expanded on this idea with the famous equation E = mc2, relating mass and energy. This formula demonstrates that a small particle of matter contains an enormous amount of energy. This forms much of the basis for nuclear energy.