Centuries of Change, a new book exploring ten centuries of innovation all downloaded to my Kindle

The shock of the new, travelling by train in 1830

I have always been fascinated by how past generations have adapted and taken in their stride the sweeping changes that confronted them during their lives.

Take my uncle George who was born in the 19th century, lived out his life in the 20th and died at the beginning of the 21st.

During that long life he would have listened  to the early radio broadcasts of King George V talking to the nation, marvelled at the first flying machines, made his own first telephone call and went on to enjoy first the cinema, then the television and in his 95th year was keen to  try out a computer.

In my own 65 years I can remember the old knife grinder who turned up at our door offering to sharpen our knives using his pedal driven grinder, followed the horse drawn milk float and spent evenings listening to the wireless in front of an open coal fire.

Space stations, 1957

Added to which  just a few years after I had given up reading the Eagle comic with its space hero Dan Dare travelling across the Galaxy I sat and watched the live transmission of the first landing on the moon.

More quite recently if someone had told me I could own a small portable device which allowed me to instantly communicate with anyone around the globe, transmit images and receive all sorts of information I would have laughed at them.

But such is change, and like many who have lived through some pretty big ones I am tempted to think that it is those of us who have lived through the last century that has had to adapt the most.

Now that of course is arrant nonsense, change didn’t start in 1963* or for that matter in 1763 and pretty much every generation has had to put up with the “shock of the new.”

All of which is a long winded introduction to a new book I have started reading on Centuries of Change by Ian Mortimer.**

As the historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote in his review of the book, “it is the arrogance of modernity to think we live in uniquely eventful times, even though none of us have has ever experienced a cataclysm like the Black Death.”***

My first Nokia, circa,1994

And so the book sets out to review changes that occurred over the last ten centuries and explores for instance the power of the railway to transform the world in the 19th century against the impact of when Copernicus suggested that the Earth rotates around the Sun and Luther broke the Christian church in two in the 16th.

Nor is that all as Mr Mortimer writes in the introduction, “the aim of this book is to provoke discussion about what we are and what we have done over the course of a thousand years, as well as what we are capable of doing and what is beyond our capabilities, and to estimate what our extraordinary experiences over the last ten centuries mean for the human race.”

And as a twist I downloaded it electronically to my Kindle which neatly offers up a little observation of how change can work.

That said I for one will always want to call in at Chorlton Bookshop, partly to ensure such a good place survives but also because my kindle, does not perform well in strong sunlight and is challenged by sea water and sand.

Pictures; Inaugural journey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1830, A.B.Clayton, from the front of the Eagle February 11 1952, my first Nokia circa 1994

* Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP"   Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin

** Centuries of Change by Ian Mortimer, Bodley Head, 2014


***When the worlds changed, Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, November 2 2014