My father’s 100th birthday occurred in March of this year. Though he didn’t live to see it, he did live through some remarkable changes. His grandfather, Thomas Robert Duncan (my great-grandfather), received notice during the Civil War, along with all the other Union soldiers, that President Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day “of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father.” Thanksgiving in the midst of the deadliest war our nation ever faced?
Yes, because as my greatgrandfather said to his children and grandchildren: “God brought us through our greatest tragedy.”
But Thanksgiving then, just three years before my father’s birth and 45 years after President Lincoln’s proclamation, was radically different from today, considering the living conditions of folks just 103 years ago in 1908.
Half of all Americans lived on farms or in towns with fewer than 2,500 residents, and the country had 6 million farms. The new Model T Ford would soon be adapted for use as a pickup truck for farmers.
General Electric Co. introduced the first commercially successful electric toaster, pricing it at about $1.45 (average wage was 22 cents per hour - the average worker made between $200 and $400 per year).
Its wire body, resting on a porcelain base, held a slice of bread close to bare electric coils, but only about 10 percent of U.S. homes were wired for electricity.
French physicist Gabriel Lippmann won the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the first method of color photography (that’s right - all photographs were black and white).
Melitta Bentz (Germany) introduced the idea of using circles of porous paper to prepare coffee by filtering the coffee through the paper. In 1909, she exhibited her filter coffeepot at the Leipzig trade fair; by 1912 she manufactured her own line of coffee filters.
An electric typewriter was introduced the same year, but manual typewriters would continue for decades to reign supreme in offices and newsrooms.
Orville Wright, five years after his first poweredflight, made the first airplane flight that lasted an hour.
A letter about “Distant Electric Vision” in the June 18 issue of Nature magazine by Edinburgh-born London electrical engineer A.
A. Campbell Swinton, 45, advanced the technology of a new amazing idea of television with a suggestion that using a cathode ray to scan pictures electronically, synchronize the images and display them would be more practical than using the Nipkow Disk invented in 1883. Although he would lecture on his television concept with circuit diagrams in 1911, he never applied for a patent.
All of these events occurred just three years before my father was born.
Yet he would live through the second World War and return home to see the full development of these amazing machines, and a flight into space that landed a man on the moon, while his oldest son rode the ocean waves on his way to Vietnam and would listen in on the astronaut’s conversations with Houston (I was a Navy radioman and used the ship’s receivers to listen to those historic conversations). Now, in the 100th year since my father’s birth, our life is filled with blessings not even imagined just before he was born. We should be a grateful people, having survived life-threatening wars and enjoying comforts our forebears would not think possible, and we should be eager to give God thanksgiving for these things, and so much more, this November 2011.
Perhaps a personal list would help, so: “That I may proclaim with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all your wondrous works.” Psalms 26:7
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Editor’s note: Jim Duncan is the pastor of Mountain Bible Church, Mountain, Mo. He may be contacted at P.O. Box 146, Pea Ridge, AR 72751; or by telephone at 417-341-8504; by e-mail at james. [email protected]. His Web site is www.jamesduncan-writer.net
Church, Pages 2 on 11/23/2011