Mendel Letters 109 — The Last 100 Years
January 7, 2023
Dear Mendel,
I’m reading a book by physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson where he discusses how radically the world changed between 1900 and 2000. It got me thinking about the changes that took place during your lifetime, 1920 to 2014.
On the 1920 census, your parents Solomon and Fannie, your sister Kate and brother Abraham, were living at 95 Pitt Street in Manhattan. The census shows residence on April 1, so you aren’t mentioned because you weren’t born until July 1.
1920 was right after the end of World War I, it was the start of Prohibition, and it was the first year the right of women to vote was ensured by the 19th amendment. 1920 was also the year of the first public radio station broadcast, the invention of the band-aid, a patent was issued for the “Tommy Gun,” the U.S. Senate voted against joining the League of Nations, and Cleveland beat Brooklyn in the World Series. Other inventions during the 1920s include television, traffic lights, frozen food, self-winding watches, penicillin, and bubble gum. The first movie with sound was The Jazz Singer in 1927. A movie ticket then cost 25 cents, if you had it.
In 1920 there were 7.5 million cars and trucks in the United States. By 1930, there 23 million cars and more than half of American families owned a car. In 2020, there were more than 275 million cars, motorcycles, trucks, buses, and other motor vehicles.
By the end of the 1930s, there were a few hundred televisions in America. Commercial broadcasting started in 1941.The first World Series broadcast on television was in 1947. I remember in the 1950s we had this enormous TV box with a tiny screen. Your brother Abe would come over to change blown tubes and keep it working. In the 1950s, maybe it was 1954, everybody from the apartment building crowded into a neighbor’s apartment to see their color television, but you and mother still had a black and white set when I move out in 1969.
You hit your teens during the Great Depression and your twenties during World War II. I know you tried to enlist but were turned down because you could barely see after botched experimental eye surgery in the 1920s. During the war they developed amazing new ways to kill people including airplanes for bombing cities and the atomic bomb.
According to Time magazine, the 20 most influential inventions of the 20th century included the refrigerator and air conditioning. Once you and your sister Kate argued about the Yiddish word for refrigerator. It turns out there was no Yiddish word for refrigerator because Eastern European Jews came to the United States before the refrigerator was invented. You probably missed the notice about the air conditioner because you and Mother didn’t buy one until the 1970s.
In the 1960s, humans flew into space and men landed on the moon. The space race led to miniaturization to lower the weight of things, the development of smaller and smaller transistors, and computers. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what a transistor is, but I am writing this letter on my desktop computer and looking up dates and places on the Internet, pretty magical stuff. Scientists invented the transistor in 1947 and today they operate heart pacemakers, musical devices, home appliances, computers, and cars. You know how you and mother would get lost when she was driving somewhere new. Transistors in cars are in contact with satellites orbiting the Earth so you can get driving directions via your car radio. My portable cell phone, the one I keep in my pocket, has more computer power than space scientists had in the 1960s and I can make calls, send messages, store messages, take photographs, and shoot movies. It is my built-in alarm clock, weather station, and news source with lots of games to play if I get bored.
Funny, some predictions made for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris are still science fiction. We don’t have flying hover cars or personal batwings, blimps came and went as a form of air travel, robots aren’t giving us haircuts, whales and giant mutated seahorses haven’t been domesticated, and North America is not one giant country.
Some of the best advances during your lifetime were in medicine, but I’ll write you about those in another letter.
Your son
Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.
