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The tape recorder was unveiled in 1900 at the Paris Exposition, to which visitors flocked to be scandalized by Rodin's non-Victorian statues, and Kodak introduced the Brownie camera, an apt symbol of a century in which technology would at first seem magical, then become simple, cheap and personal. The Scholastic Aptitude Test was born that year, permitting a power shift from an aristocracy to a meritocracy. The Wright brothers went to Kitty Hawk to try out their gliders. Lenin, 30, published his first newspaper calling for revolution in Russia. Churchill, 25, was elected to the House of Commons. J.P. Morgan began working with a young executive named Charles Schwab to buy out Andrew Carnegie and conglomerate U.S. Steel, by far the biggest business in the world. And the German physicist Max Planck made one of the discoveries that would shape the century: that atoms emit radiations of energy in bursts he called quanta.
From these seeds was born a century that can be summed up and labeled in a handful of ways:
THE CENTURY OF FREEDOM If you had to pick a two-word summation, it would be: freedom won. It beat back the two totalitarian alternatives that arose to challenge it, fascism and communism. By the 1990s, the ideals developed by centuries of philosophers from Plato to Locke to Mill to Jefferson--individual rights, civil liberties, personal freedoms and democratic participation in the choice of leaders--finally held sway over more than half the world's population.
THE CENTURY OF CAPITALISM Democracy can exist without capitalism, and capitalism without democracy, but probably not for very long. Political and economic freedom tend to go together. Early in the century, Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for a government-guided free market, one that encouraged individual initiative while protecting people against cartels and the colder faces of capitalism. His cousin Franklin confronted capit alism's greatest challenge, the Great Depression, by following these principles. Half a world away, Lenin laid the groundwork for a command economy, and his successor, Stalin, showed how brutal it could be. They ended up on the ash heap of history. Although capitalism will continue to face challenges, internally and externally, it is now the economic structure for most societies around the world.
THE ELECTRONIC CENTURY A defining event actually occurred three years before the century began: the discovery of the electron by British physicist J.J. Thomson. Along with Planck's 1900 theory of quantum physics, this discovery led to the first weapon of mass destruction, which helped hasten the end of the Second World War and became the defining reality of the cold war. Alan Turing harnessed electronics to devise the first digital computers. Five centuries earlier, Gutenberg's printing press had cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of a thousand. That paved the way for the Reformation by allowing individuals to have their own Bibles, and for the progress of individual liberties, which became inevitable once information and ideas flowed freely. The transistor and the microchip have cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of more than a million. The result has been a transition from an industrial age to an information age.