how was it like to live 80 years back?

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what did they thought in these years? how it was like?

i'm asking because i really wondered about it now after starting to watch The Grand Illusion

anyone thought about it or studied it?

Ask OliveOilMom. She was there.

Ouch ! !

Some of ARE old enough to have parents who were alive then.

My mother's father died when she was quite young. During the Great Depression, her family (my mother, her mother, her sister, and her brother) lived in a schoolhouse on a ranch in West Texas. The schoolhouse had two rooms, one for the schoolroom and one for their living quarters.

My really good friend died at age 86,he didn't recommend it.He said "The "good ol'days" were not so good.No antibiotics would be a big issue,if you got an ear ache all you had were home remedies and some of those were worse than the illness.
Blowing cigarette smoke into the ear,or you could squeeze the juice of a "Bessie Bug" into your ear(that is not a joke).Kerosene to clean wounds,sulfer and lard for skin problems.
NO thanks,I like my satalite t.v.
But he did say that families were closer and did more things together,so there were some really nice things.

there was a lot more freedom to deal with bullies.

That is very true.

the entertainments outside of the library were fairly mediocre. outside of the concert hall or nightclub, there was no such thing as high-fidelity audio reproduction. of course there was [outside of places like new york and london experimental labs] no television to speak of. no video games. no cell phones. bluenosed busybody moralists ruled the roost. all the cars were comparitively slow and had mediocre gas mileage. almost everything was in monochrome. no microwave ovens, no fast food. and forget about surround sound- the movies all had monophonic sound systems with frequency response limited to a range of approx. 100-5000 [+ or - 6 db] cycles per second. there was almost no air conditioning. prohibition still had a few months left until the 21st amendment [ending prohibition] was ratified january 17, 1933. there was still de facto slavery/indentured servitude in the south. corporal punishment wasn't only for children. if you were poor and homeless, that was considered a crime ["vagrancy"]. in short, the old days SUCKED BIG WIND. people who long for "simpler" times should be aware that they had a lot of heavy baggage attached.

You're right. You couldn't have survived 80 years ago. Sucks, doesn't it?

i had a recent interest in how people really were in antiquity. no one can know what the accents of english people sounded like in the 1400's for example. to see an actual movie of life on the street in the 1400's would be extremely intresting to me.

unfortunately, there are no pictures of those times, and the oldest moving footage i have been able to find that is interesting (because it does not try to introduce artistic license into the still novel world of moving (motion) pictures) is a film taken in 1906 in Market st san francisco.




i have watched it many times and i feel i understand quite a bit about what i see in the film.
also, the speed of the film is not like the fast motion of many old films.


it seems to me that very many people were standing by the street for no reason at all other than to simply witness the events happening in the world around them.
it is understandable when i think of the fact that there was no radio or tv in those days, so it would have been quite boring to be at home with no mental stimulation available except for books that, once read, are useless (unless one has a bad memory).

i can imagine how the idle people on the street padded out their activities for their otherwise empty day. first they would wash vigorously, and then they would meticulously shave (i am talking about the men in the clip because they are the predominant gender in the clip, and i have not yet watched it with a sole view to inspecting the females in the clip), and then they would don their freshly starched "strolling" clothes complete with a tie, and arm themselves with a smoking pipe and a hat, and in many instances, a redundant walking cane, and step out into the world and just hang around and gawk, and occasionally get wrapped up in a conversation with a fellow "reality show" addict that has to get dressed up and ply the streets to witness it. it is like the most manual form of facebook possible.

also, i noticed that a car with a number plate that was "4567" overtake the cameraman on multiple occasions during the clip. it suggests to me that the driver of that car had nowhere to go, and was continuously just driving up and down the street for the fun of it.

that would be understandable to me because the concept of non horse powered mobility would be an immense novelty that many people with new cars would find hard to resist indulging in. cars behave in a way that is entirely dependent on one's input, where as horses have a mind of their own, and therefore, "a slice of the cake".
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it is interesting that there was no age specific way of dressing then. little boys wore the same type of hats, and miniaturized replicas of the clothes that their fathers and grandfathers wore.
there seems to be very little variation in conformation to the clothing styles of that time.
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people seemed in the clip to have longer stride lengths than modern day people.
maybe it is due to the fact that they had to walk much more than we do now.
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some people seemed almost defiant toward the cable car, and they stood close by to the tracks as if to dare the cable car to continue and run them over, but they walked out of harms way with ease at the last minute because the cable car is so slow. i guess that was one flavor of humor in those days
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there was no concept of road rules then. people walked across the street as if they owned it. all the traffic was haphazard in it's flow, and it was also slow, so people could get out of the way easily, and they just casually stroll across the road as they need to without having to think about pedestrian crossings.

the most informative idea i get from this film is how people populated the streets for their social requirements in those days



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oubsaFBUcTc[/youtube]

As I understand it, the reason for the fast motion of many old films is that prior to the standardization of the frame rates of motion picture films, there were a wide variety of frame rates in use from much slower than current to a little faster. For the old hand cranked cameras, the frame rate was entirely dependent on the rate at which the cameraman cranked the camera.

If you were to view any old film at the frame rate at which it was filmed, it would appear to be normal.

It was not a very good time to have a mental illness,locked up and the key thrown away.

what will they think 80 years from now about our times?

I wonder this sometimes.

My maternal grandmother was born in the late 1800s, my parents in the first quarter of the 20th century. They lived through a lot of hard times, but fascinating ones as well. My grandmother was proud to say she saw mankind go from horses and carriages to a walk on the moon. Her father installed the first flushing toilet in her town, and she learned to drive a car in a model you had to crank to start, and on a steep grade, on a dirt road.

They (between them) survived no antibiotics, the Depression, WWI and WWII. There was a lot of loss, lots of hard physical work, and hardship. People were, I think, more resilient back then about problems, they faced them differently. But then they had different kinds of problems than we have today. Not better or worse, just different. And there were a lot less people. It was easier to be a person who wasn't as socially oriented back then, I think, especially where my grandmother grew up, out in the country. But it was also harder to be very different. People took care of each other a little more, I think, from listening to their stories, but they could also be more bigoted and more brutal. After all, back then it wasn't considered child abuse to beat your kid, it was considered discipline. And there were separate businesses that people of different races were expected to patronize, and so forth. Mental illness wasn't very well understood. Surgery was to some degree experimental. There was no easy entertainment, no TV, not even radio when my grandmother was a girl, people made their own entertainment. When they had a dance in the country, all the kids danced too, it wasn't considered something you do on a date, it was community and family-centered. Where she grew up, on her father's homestead, they grew a lot of their own food. Fruit trees, vegetable gardens, a dairy, beef cattle, chickens for eggs and meat, and bees for honey. That sounds romantic, doesn't it? But it was a lot of work! They cooked from scratch, had no electricity or hot water, no washing machine, no electric mixer, no power tools for doing their outdoor work. They didn't need to exercise at a gym to stay healthy, because everything they did was exercise. They exercised to survive.

^^^^There were advantages,people did help each other out,you had to,a community depended on everyone pulling together,if your barn burned your neighbors would gather and help rebuild.You would do the same for them.
But childhood illness could be fatal,my great- grandmother had the first six children die.
(But on the other hand,this kept population down). If you walk around in old cemeteries there are lots of little tombstones for the babies that died.
The area I live in is very rural and people still help each other out,but you see less and less of the "old fashioned" pie suppers and box lunches.But I do know that if I needed help I could call any of my neighbors and get it,even though I'm kinda weird and don't visit them.But I lucked out,lots of other "unusual" people on my road.

I am a 1936 model and I have some recollection of how it was in the late thirties and early forties.

T.V. was a new technology and was not wide spread. All they had in the Early Days was black and white t.v. with rather small screens. The T.V. sets were very expensive. A t.v. with a 6 x 6 screen would run the equivalent of 1500 -2000 current dollars.

No computers then. The programmed computer was invented about 1938 in the U.S. and in Germany (independently). In the late 40's there were a few computers used for scientific purposes.

Except for style automobiles were pretty much as they are now, but heavier since they were all steel and plastics were little used.

Telephones are all wire and land lines. Big clunky instruments. The closest thing to a hand-held phone was the walkie-talkie which was a transmitter receiver unit with a limited range. They weighed at least 20 pounds.

Food was pretty much as it is now. Clothing differed in style mostly. The synthetic fibers was just coming out in the late 30s and early 40s.

If you were transported back to say 1938 (the years that the Martians invaded Grovers Mill, New Jersey) you would recognize everything although it would look clunky and oversized in modern eyes. But you would not be lost or confounded.

ruveyn