alt Hacker NewsAnd 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.
I still have the reels, they look like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
On the one hand, it's fascinating to know just how much of what shapes our lives was already there a hundred years ago in some form.
On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...