August 4, 2006
The Round Number Problem II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Fredric Smoler made some very interesting points in his post on round numbers, especially the essential uselessness of centuries and decades as organizing principles in history. But while life is lived day by day, history is shaped, by both historians and the collective folk memory of the people, and we all tend to look at the accidents of our decimal number system as having significance. If evolution had given us six digits per hand instead of five, I imagine the whole history of the world would look very different. It is almost impossible not to look at these ready-made packets of time and pick out the most salient features of each as characterizing them. One can point out how illogical that is, but that won’t change things, I’m afraid. This brings to mind an interesting point, how historical eras get names. The first thing to notice is that they don’t get them until they are over or at least well on the way to being over. The era that’s in progress is always just “now” or “these days” or “modern times.” The first use of the term “Middle Ages” didn’t come about until 1722, more than 200 years after the conventional date for their end, 1500. The term “industrial revolution” was coined only in 1848, when its consequences brought down governments all over Europe, and didn’t become common until the 1880s, when the process was more than a hundred years old. The term “Victorian” was first used in 1875, when the eponymous queen had been on the throne for nearly 40 years. (The term was coined by an American, not a Briton, by the way, E. C. Stedman, a poet and editor who made a living as a Wall Street broker. Not even the French, who gave the word chauvinism to the world, object, however, habitually calling the period “l’époque victorienne.”) I suspect that what we call modern times will soon be relegated to the past and given a label. The microprocessor is changing things so rapidly and so profoundly—at least as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution and far more quickly—that our grandchildren will look on the world before 1969, the year of the first microprocessor, the way we look on the world that existed before World War I. I can’t wait for some wide-eyed six-year-old to say to me, “Do you really remember using a typewriter? Wow!”
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