H.G. Wells the Rational Escapist

If you think our world has changed at an unprecedented rate; if you think we’re all but doomed by carbon and capital, or that we might be saved by solar power and silicon; if you wonder whether and when English-speaking societies have ever been through so much so fast, you might look at the years after 1880, when telephones and electric light and the phonograph, cheap high-volume printing and wireless signals and radio, bicycles, trolleys, automobiles, tanks, airplanes, and (not least) compulsory public education made the globe seem smaller, more tightly bound together, and time itself seem to speed up. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (as the historian Stephen Kern put it) had altered.