[[email protected]]

Was America a better place then? I think so.

To be sure, a hundred years ago, any major city stank of ****, human
and horse, there was no air conditioning, and people must have had
body odor most of the time. Indoor plumbing was not a common practice
much before 1900 and not universal until the Roaring Twenties, and
having central hot water heating was in fact only nearly universal at
roughly the dawn of WWII. The upper classes had them a generation
earlier of course, and so we forget that many working class families
could remember chamber pots within living memory.

The next fifty years, from 1909 to 1959, brought the most
foundational changes technologically in every aspect of life, from
birth to childhood to working life, retirement, and death, of any
similar period in human history. An Egyptian or Chinese for four
thousand years, perhaps, could live to sixty (although most did not)
and reflect back on his, or her, experience from the age of ten with
little change in day to day life. A Briton from earliest to later
Victorian life would have seen more change, but the basics were
relatively similar. But an American, male or female, working or middle
or patrician in class, would find such a massive upheaval that in
fact, most people still alive in 1969 who had been born in 1909-ten
years onward from even then and after the tumultuus six or seven years
that constituted the tumultuous 1960s-were not particularly stunned or
shocked by the television images they watched as American Neil
Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander ladder onto the moon. In fact,
it was not considered remarkable that most Americans born in 1909 did
watch the lunar landing. That fifty percent of the population would
see their sixtieth birthday was a historical milestone few took for
anything but routine.

Most modern people would consider it more pleasant to live in 1959
than in 1909. But would either be preferable to 2009? It's of course a
moot question, since time travel is either absolutely impossible or is
sufficiently far in the future that those visiting us today in their
own past are universally discreet so as we can not detect them, or
even tangentially infer their presence.

My own opinion is that intellectually 1909 was far better than today,
and that a learned person might well prefer it, but that 1959 overall
was probably the zenith of American life and the best time in history
simply to have experienced the country, although the foundations were
even then being attacked by termites of various species.

The concern allegedly of interest here is, or was, the business of
sound reproduction. In that, 1959 was truly the golden era. The
technology was sufficiently advanced to permit results that today can
be improved only asymptotically, yet, cost cutting and cheapening were
not the order of the day. Profit margins were good, and talented
people still designed and good workers still assembled and tested each
item here in the United States. With the exception of some very
specific items in Britain and Germany, all the best items were made in
the United States. People making them could afford to own a house and
feed a family. And a considerable number of audiophiles built a good
percentage of their own systems from component parts, giving them
knowledge and experience later 'appliance operators' would never
attain.