By Sandy Vasko

Ask any senior citizen, and they will say that technology is moving too fast to keep up with. We envision a world where children can’t write their name, everyone will have a portable electronic device implanted in their head that will tell them what to buy at the store, when to take a pill, how to get to their destination and anything else that we used to use our brains for.

Woe is the future of humanity!

Folks at the beginning of last century thought the same thing. The automobile, the aeroplane, the blimp, the telephone, the electric light and moving pictures could potentially be harmful to our way of life.

Let’s start with the moving picture show. Most small towns had a moving picture show at least several days a week by 1910. In larger towns, the theaters were open every night. A stern warning was printed in the July 1, 1910, Wilmington Advocate: “Over indulgence in moving picture shows may cost attorney C. W. Britt of Omaha his eyesight. He went to Clarkson hospital, where an operation was performed on his right eye by Dr. Harold Gifford Sunday.

“Flickering of the moving pictures attended almost nightly for two months by Mr. Britt and members of his family is said to have aggravated former eye trouble. A growth under the lid of the right eye resulted. Mr. Britt was totally blind in the right eye before going to the hospital, but hoped that the operation would restore the sight.”

We read about another bad influence of the moving picture show on August 18, 1911, in the Joliet Signal: “Inspired by moving pictures of Jesse James, fifteen boys robbed the grocery store of George Stonich and then divided $65 ($2,290) worth of plunder among themselves. Eight have been arrested.”

Aeroplanes, now known as airplanes, and dirigibles, now known as blimps, were vying with each other as to which would become the air transportation of the future. Aeroplanes were considered much more dangerous and held relatively few passengers, while the dirigible could accommodate many people in a basket or “boat” underneath the balloon. The result of this is the cartoon showing the bad guys in small maneuverable blimps while passengers in the dirigible were being robbed.

It was in 1911 along the Mexican border when the aeroplane was first used by the military against the insurgents in the Mexican Revolution. We read on February 10, 1911, in the Wilmington Advocate: “Washington – The war department is about to establish an aeroplane patrol along the Rio Grande river and for the first time in this country, aviators will enter the military service of the United States.

“So far as an air scout can discover, General Hoyt, the commander of the department of Texas, will soon be in a position to determine the facts as to the activities of the insurgents along the Mexican border. At present, owing to conflicting reports, the army officers engaged in maintaining neutrality find the task difficult, and the troops are continually making wild goose chases after military expeditions reported to be crossing the Rio Grande, which rarely materialize.”

That same year, a great Interstate Fair was held in Kankakee, the main feature was aeroplanes. As part of the show, aviators would go up and drop “bombs” on the crowd, usually made up of sacks of flour. A New York pundit was quoted as saying, “The human race is absolutely unprotected from above.”

But was the human race headed for extinction? Perhaps it was. In the February 17, 1911, Advocate we read: “Mercury and Venus are already dead and dried up worlds, Mars in rapidly approaching a state of wrinkled old age, and the Earth is next in the procession headed toward the extinction of all life, “according to Dr. Percival Lowell, head of the Lowell observatory.

“Mars is certainly inhabited by some character of organized life,” Dr. Lowell said in his opening lecture, “and the Martians have far greater reason to deny that there is life on the earth than we have that they do not exist.

“With city chimneys always belching forth smoke and making it rain, man is responsible for more than half the bad weather of which he complains. On Mars the sky is perpetually clear from morning until night and from spring to fall.

“While the water on the earth is slowly but surely disappearing through sublimation into the heavens, and sinking into the earth, on Mars the seas have already disappeared, though there appears to have been seas there ages ago.”

Yes, folks were getting scared, but technology marched on. In 1910, a factory in France began producing one of the rarest substances in the world. It soon went into everything from lipstick to water fountains. We read on March 23, 1911: “The radium business according to reports from Paris, France, flourished in 1910. The Bank of Radium sold $153,000 worth ($5,377,700 today), or nearly two grains – 1.92 to be exact. Of this $14,000 worth went for commercial purposes, the rest for medical. Even a bigger business is anticipated for 1911.”

Oh yah, nothing to worry about there!?!?!

Sandy Vasko serves as Collection Chair and lead researcher at the Will County Historical Museum and Research Center.