Everyone was on the move at the beginning of the century. The 19th century had begun the process with rail and steamship travel (and of course, the bicycle), but now there was the car and the aeroplane. A settled, sedate way of life with the horse as the main means of transport was vanishing forever.
The means were now available for conquering huge distances, and so began the century's accelerating sense of global shrinkage, a loss of connection with any real sense of the actual proportions of the Earth (space travel in the 1960s and the Internet in the 1980s and 1990s brought this trend even further). The appearance of the landscape would be changed forever to facilitate this new development, and a long, volatile dependency on oil would ensue.
Einstein's newly discovered theory of relativity was brought vividly to life: whizzing along in a motor car or in an aircraft drastically altered any fixed sense of time or space. The motor industry was already underway in 1900, thanks to Nikolaus Otto's invention of the four-stroke internal combustion engine in 1876. But in 1903 the Ford Motor Company was born in Detroit and, with it, a whole new system of mass production. In 1908 the Model T Ford went on sale. The car was originally manufactured one at a time, taking 14 hours, but after 1912 the introduction of assembly-line and mass production techniques stepped up output very smartly. By 1914, each car took 95 minutes to make.
Ford, who wanted his automobiles to be affordable for the average person, single-handedly changed the car from a handcrafted luxury for the wealthy few into a means of travel for many. His invention and development of the mass-production line altered the face of industry.
Also in 1903, Orville Wright became the first man to fly. He and his brother Wilbur, two inventors from Ohio, designed a simple, petrol-engined biplane with two wings linked by vertical struts, with movable wingtips to control the aircraft and twin propellers powered by a single engine. The pilot was supported by a harness slung beneath the lower wing. After being tested in a wind tunnel, Flyer took to the air from the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1909, Louis Bleriot, a French aviator, became the first person to fly across the English Channel between England and France. He made the crossing in 43 minutes in an open cockpit. In 1919, the two-man team of John Alcock and Arthur WhittenBrown made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo transatlantic flight.
Although, amazingly, the Wright brothers met with blank looks when they suggested to the American military that their invention might prove useful in warfare, they were soon proved correct. A new system of airborne, distance conflict was born, facilitating a sense of detachment among its perpetrators, with deadly consequences for the rest of the century.
