Free A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

still be found in archives).
    Marconi sent his first Morse code signal by radio across the Atlantic that same year. The Atlantic Ocean had long before been crossed by telegraph wires; it was to be the turn of the Pacific in 1903, which acquired its first submarine cable in the same year that Orville and Wilbur Wright launched their tiny biplane beside the sea at Kitty Hawk. A message sent from the White House took only twelve minutes to come back to the transmitting telegraphers, having circumnavigated the planet via a now fully connected skein of cables, and at what was then a barely imaginable speed. The diesel engine was introduced to the United States in 1904. The rambunctious and boisterously enthusiastic radio engineer Lee De Forest created the triode, known as the Audion, around the same time and with it sent the first voice broadcasts across the oceans; later he transmitted music from the top of the Eiffel Tower during his honeymoon (the second of the four he would enjoy in his lifetime), the signal being picked up 500 miles away. And finally, though Elisha Otis had invented the principle of the elevator as early as 1852, the first such device having been installed in a New York department store in 1857, and though the Bessemer process allowed steel girders to be used (in place of iron columns) in construction, thus permitting taller and taller buildings to be made, it was not until these early-twentieth-century years that a combination of engineering, ambition, and architectural enthusiasm coalesced sufficiently to allow for the building in New York of the world’s first true skyscrapers. They were to be far taller than the big buildings of Chicago that are usually taken to be the ur-structures of the breed, and yet in both cities they were ornate and rhapsodical and flamboyant—and for the next two decades many were modeled on classical structures from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, or from Venice, Spain, and the work of the Moors.
    The ornate appearance of Manhattan’s first pair of tall buildings, the Metropolitan Life and the Woolworth, which were being built around the time of the events in San Francisco, suggests the lingering hesitancy of the time. Their look implies that, despite the rush of scientificdiscovery and progress, people were not ready—as they rarely are—to abandon completely the attitudes of those more comfortable years that were just beginning to slip into history. The British poet John Betjeman, who was born in London in 1906 (six months after the earthquake), wrote much later, in the thirties, a brief farewell to King George V, a slight poem that reflects the conflicted view of these earlier times as well. It offers a sentimental grace note to an era that the poet knew only as a child, but that he saw as having been fully and finally extinguished by the ways of the modern:
    Old men in country houses hear clocks ticking
    Â Â Â Â Â  Over thick carpets with a deadened force;
    Old men who never cheated, never doubted ,
    Â Â Â Â Â  Communicated monthly, sit and stare …
    In the San Francisco that existed at the time of its greatest tragedy the modern was being half embraced, half disdained. Many of the more conservative Americans of the day clung to the attitudes and customs of the time that Betjeman, across the Atlantic in England, would soon so sorely miss—and to these people it scarcely mattered that Einstein had just pried a nugget of understanding from the universe, or that aircraft had been invented, or that mass production was beginning, or that the ether was starting to chatter with radio transmissions, or that immense commercial buildings were being erected to be filled by men who barked into telephones and betrayed one another in newly cutthroat ways that would in due course be exposed by muckraking newspapers (this last term was introduced in 1906, a month after the earthquake).
    NO, THE MODERN was not going to be embraced without a