A week or so back in this space, we looked fifty years behind us to 1966… the year in which Star Trek debuted. It’s thought-provoking to think about what life was like, and how different it is now… but also how much it’s still the same.
*But if our own time now is T (for Trek) + 50, there was also a time of T – 50… a time 50 years before that debut, just as our time is 50 years after. Despite our computers and cell phones and independent Africa and an African American president, that half-century before Star Trek probably brought more changes than the half-century since.
*Do you know what was closer to Star Trek than we are? World War I. When Star Trek debuted, the war had been over for 47 years and 10 months. All the horror of Spanish influenza, the Great Depression, the rape of Nanking, World War II, the Hitler genocide, the Korean War, the nuclear axe swinging over us, and the early years of Vietnam were crammed into less than 48 years.
*On the other hand, those same years brought forth penicillin, polio vaccine, television, jets, satellites, space travel, direct dialing, and rural electrification.
*What was going on in 1916… at T – 50?
*Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President, beating former New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes. In New York, and in most other states, women couldn’t vote.
*Corning Glass Works introduced Pyrex to the buying pubic. Glenn Curtiss sold controlling interest in his company for seven million dollars. Endicott Johnson gave everybody a 40-hour week.
*On our northern border, we signed the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada. On the south, Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing almost 20 people. General Pershing led 10,000 troops, along with a dozen Curtiss Jenny biplanes, in an unsuccessful punitive invasion of Mexico.
*In Jersey City German saboteurs blew up two million pounds of ammunition at Black Tom, damaging the Statue of Liberty and doing wreckage to the tune of half-a-billion in today’s dollars.
*The German-backed Easter Rising in Ireland was crushed, but set the stage for independence five years later. The British-backed Arab Revolt, egged on by Lawrence of Arabia, also broke out. It would be far more successful, only to be betrayed by the British and French, setting up hostility between the regions today.
*In the main war, battleships clashed at Jutland. The battle of the Somme began, and the Battle of Verdun ended. Tanks were first used in significant numbers.
*Down at the bottom of the globe, Ernest Shackleton and his select crew made a desperate and unprecedented small-boat journey through polar seas, followed by the scaling of a cliff and an epic trek across South Georgia island.
*The toggle switch for electric lights first appeared. So did oxycodone. So did the Sopwith Camel. So, in silent movie cartoons, did Farmer Al Falfa.
*Dwight D. Eisenhower was at Fort Sam Houston. Franklin D. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy. Harry Truman was farming. Lyndon Johnson was eight years old, and Ronald Reagan was five. John F. Kennedy would be born in the following year.
*Emma Goldman was arrested for providing birth control information.
*The National Park Service came to be.
*Americans lynched 54 other Americans in 1916, but still the national government refused to act. So did the state governments. So did the local governments. James Weldon Johnson became field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., which proved to be a turning point for the struggling young organization.
*Jack London died, and so, after considerable struggle, did Rasputin.
*Jackie Gleason was born, as was Dinah Shore. Eugene McCarthy and Beverly Cleary first saw the light of day. Kirk Douglas, Walter Cronkite, and C. Everett Koop all drew their first breaths in 1916.
*It would be years before the names of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Amelia Earhart, Charles A. Lindbergh, and Billy Graham became household words.
*So – 1916 was just as far from the debut of Star Trek as we are. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?