Inventing Modern Growing up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins

Here is a distinctly American Modern -- a culture born of new technology and echoing out of the mind of a child growing up in a world newly transformed. The word modern infused that world. Everyone used it. Everyone knew what it meant. No one knew what it meant. The way to understanding any epoch is by reclaiming its peculiar texture. Yet the Modern that we all saw at the time was misleading. It was a world dancing with new X-rays, radium, and radio waves -- Art Deco and Bauhaus, skyscrapers and Burma-Shave signs. Modern was the now-abandoned Teepee Motel down in Wharton County, Texas, and Grauman's Chinese Theatre. It was Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis and Buck Rogers. We last saw Modern speeding off into the mists of the fifties on great automobile tailfins. Yet there had to be more to it than that! Science was surely a red thread running through Modern. As relativity theory and quantum mechanics departed from everything we had believed to constitute reality, it was clear that nothing would remain the same -- that we faced change of a magnitude hitherto unimaginable. But the immensity of the transformation that occurred just after 1900 is actually cloaked by the accomplishments that brought it about. It reveals itself only after we have opened ourselves to the kitsch and commonplace material world where we struggled to express the mystery of transmutation. And so this biography of Modern is more zoetropic than analytical. Instead of explaining how Modern came into being and then vanished, we relive it. We watch its birth a century ago, we join in the frenetic intensity of its middle years, and at last we attend its passing in the late fifties. Book jacket.

John H. Lienhard is the M.D. Anderson Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston. He has worked as an engineer and educator since 1951, and is well known in thermal engineering. He has also written about, and taught, history since the 1970s. He is the author and host of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a weekday radio essay on the history of creativity and invention (heard on many public radio stations), and he is author of the book by the same name.