October 21, 1999

1800-1900: STEAMING TOWARD REVOLUTION

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

Napoleon Bonaparte closed out the 18th century as the military champion of human rights and continued that role as the 19th century got started, but before long he became something else - a charismatic, absolute ruler wreaking havoc across the face of Europe and setting the stage in the next century for the rise of tyrants like Hitler and Stalin, also men who rose to power on populist principles before turning to oppression and butchery.

Unlike them, however, Bonaparte also left a positive legacy of law (the Napoleonic Code is still used in many parts of the world today) and constructive internationalism.

Such unalloyed heroes also existed as Simon Bolivar, the Latin American colossus who liberated vast tracts of South and Central America from European rule in a series of arduous wars.

In North America, at the time of Napoleon - and partly because of his shocking rise - "democracy" was a pejorative term. Painfully, events would move toward liberalization culminating in the end of slavery, but not without much bloodshed.

In the meantime the United States swelled in its physical proportions, first with the Louisiana Purchase from France (so Bonaparte could finance his European depradations), then with the forcible annexation from Mexico of Texas, then California (not coincidentally, shortly after gold was discovered there), and in 1867 with the purchase of Alaska from Russia.

While the United States grew, the whole world shrank. In America, the Erie Canal and, in North Africa, the Suez Canal drastically foreshortened the length of time and travel required for trade and communication.

Bringing steam locomotive technology up out of the mines, engineers produced the first surface railroad in 1828 - the beginning of a gargantuan public-works process that climaxed with the completion of the American transcontinental railroad in 1869. By the end of the century, much of the planet was intricately fitted with railroad lines carrying millions of people and goods to and fro 24 hours a day.

By mid-century, steam travel also took to the seas, making the unpredictable, fate-driven, tempest-tossed voyages of the age of sail a thing of the past. Admiral Perry of the United States sailed a fleet of ships uninvited into Japanese waters, putting the Japanese on notice that superior firepower would be brought to bear if they continued to resist commerce with the West. Japan got the message, and its gates were opened.

The world got smaller in other ways. In plenty of time for the War Between the States, Samuel Morse hit on the idea of conveying information over vast distances by means of electronic impulses - the birth of binary cyber-technology. In the '70s Alexander Graham Bell went him one better with the invention of the telephone, and by the beginning of our century parents were already telling their teenage girls to get off the phone.

Something that had begun 10,000 years ago - the Neolithic Revolution, or the birth of agriculture - began to ebb for the first time. Steam-driven means of harvesting cotton and of processing it into textiles evolved and grew, quickly emerging from the factories of Manchester, England, and the fields of the American South to create jobs and money in regions all over Europe and Asia. For the first time large masses of working people had something to do besides till the soil - work in factories, sometimes for 12 or more hours a day.

Also for the first time, men and women developed a coherent and comprehensive picture of the Earth's past. Charles Darwin shocked the world in 1859 with the idea that humans had painstakingly evolved - over millions of years' time - from lower animals, and the discovery of the remains of anatomically different early humans in the Neander Valley in Germany around the same time drove the point home.

If any evidence were needed of humanity's savage origins, the American Civil War supplied it. Fully half a million men died on domestic battlefields and the forces of reaction represented by John Wilkes Booth turned Abraham Lincoln into a martyr.

The vast nation of Russia experienced some of the same violent pangs: Czar Nicholas freed the serfs in 1861, just as our armed strife over slavery was beginning, and Russia's body politic was wracked by riots, bombings, assassinations, conspiracies, hangings, and mass imprisonment from about 1850 on, culminating finally in 1917 with the murder of the Russian royal family.

Happily, a couple of wizards were at work during the last stages of the century, named Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison. Pasteur opened the world's eyes to the existence of germs, little invisible creatures that spread disease but were vulnerable to medicine and hygiene. Edison, by dint of endless laboratory hours, threw a saddle on Ben Franklin's electricity, lighting homes and cities and creating such indispensable adjuncts of our time as the phonograph and the cinema.

In 1897, the Lumiere brothers opened the first movie theater in Paris. The movie of the modern age was ready to begin.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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