The 20th century began slowly, to the ticking of grandfather clocks and the stately rhythms of progress established by high Victorian seriousness. Thanks to science, industry and moral philosophy, mankind's steps had at last been guided unerringly up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way to the century of oil and electricity, new and transforming sources of power and light. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable, ordained by natural law.
And everything argued that such development would continue...
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