New in 1900

1900 – 1910 was not just a new era for orchestral music and the arts – huge discoveries were being made in the scientific world too.

Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity in 1905, Max Planck formulated Quantum Theory in 1900 and Sigmund Freud published both the ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ and his Theory of Sexuality during this decade.

It was also a decade of great invention, with the creation of some of the everyday household items we couldn’t imagine living without today…

An artists represenatation of Puffing Billy

Vacuum cleaner

Hubert Cecil Booth of England has the strongest claim to inventing the motorised vacuum cleaner, in 1901. The idea came to him as Booth watched a demonstration of a cleaning device, which blew dust off the chairs, and thought it would be much more useful to have one that sucked dust up. He tested the idea by laying a handkerchief on the seat of a restaurant chair, putting his mouth to the handkerchief, and then trying to suck up as much dust as he could onto the handkerchief. Upon seeing the dust and dirt collected on the underside of the handkerchief, he realised the idea could work.

The initial device was a large, horse-drawn creation, nicknamed the “Puffing Billy”, with a piston pump and a cloth filter.

Booth initially did not attempt to sell his machine, but rather sold cleaning services. The vans of the British Vacuum Cleaning Company (BVCC) were bright red; uniformed operators would haul the hose off the van and route it through the windows of a building to reach all the rooms inside. Gaining the royal seal of approval, Booth’s motorized vacuum cleaner was used to clean the carpets of Westminster Abbey prior to Edward VII’s coronation in 1901.

Bakelite Jewellery

Bakelite

The first so called plastic, based on a synthetic polymer was invented in 1907, by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born American living in New York state. Baekeland was looking for an insulating shellac to coat wires in electric motors and generators. He found that combining phenol (C6H5OH) and formaldehyde (HCOH) formed a sticky mass and later found that the material could be mixed with wood flour, asbestos, or slate dust to create strong and fire resistant “composite” materials. Bakelite was originally used for electrical and mechanical parts, coming into widespread use in consumer goods and jewellery in the 1920s.

An early Gillette advertisment

Safety Razor

On November 15, 1904, patent #775,134 was granted to King C. Gillette for a safety ‘razor’. After his Wisconsin home was destroyed by fire, Gillette decided that the only way to successfully make some money and build back his life, was to come up with a great invention.

In 1895, after several years of considering and rejecting possible inventions, Gillette suddenly had a brilliant idea while shaving one morning. It was an entirely new razor and blade that flashed in his mind—a razor with a safe, inexpensive, and disposable blade.

It took six years for Gillette’s idea to evolve and during that time, technical experts told Gillette that it would be impossible. However by 1903, he had succeeded and production of the razor and blade began as the Gillette Safety Razor Company started operations in South Boston.

An early Kellogs advertisment

Cornflakes

This idea for corn flakes began by accident when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent of The Battle Creek Sanatorium in Michigan, and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, left some cooked wheat to sit while they attended to some pressing matters at the sanatorium. When they returned, they found that the wheat had gone stale, but being on a strict budget, they decided to continue to process it by forcing it through rollers, hoping to obtain long sheets of the dough. To their surprise, what they found instead were flakes, which they toasted and served to their patients.

In 1906, Will Keith Kellogg decided to try to mass-market the new food. He tried adding sugar to the flakes to try to make them more appealing to the masses, but this caused a rift between his brother and him. At the same time, Kellogg also began experimenting with new grain cereals to expand his product line. Rice Krispies, his next great hit, first went on sale in 1928.

Teabags

The first tea bags were hand-sewn silk bags. Tea bag patents date back as early as 1903, first appearing commercially around 1904. Tea bags were successfully marketed by the tea and coffee shop merchant Thomas Sullivan from New York, who shipped his tea bags around the world. The loose tea was intended to be removed from the sample bags by customers, but they found it easier to brew the tea with the tea still enclosed in the porous bags.

The first serving of iced tea was also made in 1904 by Englishmen Richard Blechynden at the St. Louis Fair.

 

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Extraordinary women of the 1900s

Just as Debussy was developing a new musical voice at the turn of the century, the women of the 1900s were also starting to make their voices heard.

At the turn of the century, women’s attitude towards themselves started to change. By 1900 New Zealand had already achieved women’s suffrage. Australian women were granted the right to vote in 1902 and Finland became the first European country to do so in 1906.

Between 1900 and 1910, the percentage of married women in the U.S. who had gainful employment outside of the home rose from 5% to 11%.

During our research into this era, we come across a number of women stood out from the crowd in a man’s world. From the hugely talented to the downright mad – here’s a few of our favourites…

Anna Pavolva

Anna Pavolova was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes at the turn of the century. She became the first ballerina to tour ballet around the world and remains one of the most famous names in dance even today.

Pavlova is perhaps most renowned for creating the role of The Dying Swan, a solo choreographed for her by Michel Fokine. The ballet, created in 1905, is danced to Le Cygne from The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter

Although best known for her highly imaginative and beautifully illustrated books for children, Beatrix Potter was also a natural scientist and conservationist.

Potter wanted to pursue a career in scientific research but was not taken seriously and was turned away from her dream job at Kew Gardens because of her gender.

During holidays in the countryside, Potter wrote letters to friends illustrating them with quick sketches. Many of these letters were written to the children of her former governess Annie Carter Moore, particularly to her eldest son Noel who was often ill. In September 1893 Potter was on holiday at Eastwood in Dunkeld, Perthshire. She had run out of things to say to Noel and so she told him a story about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter”…

That letter became one of the most famous children’s letters ever written and on 2 October 1902, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published.

Florence Lawrence

Florence Lawrence

Florence Lawrence was a Canadian silent film actress who is often credited with being the “First Movie Star”.

Lawrence had ambitions to be a Broadway star, but auditioned for a number of productions without success. However, in December 1906 she was hired by the Edison Manufacturing Company to play Daniel Boone’s daughter in the motion picture Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer Days in America. She was offered the part because she know how to ride a horse, but must have made quite an impression as she appeared in 38 films the following year and in almost 300 films during her impressive career.

In 1909 Lawrence joined the Independent Moving Pictures Company of America. She became a household name in America and the first celebrity of the movie world.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Pictured here with her dog Leo, Alice Roosevelt Longworth would have been considered a rule-breaker and a thoroughly modern woman in the early 1900s. She smoked cigarettes in public, chewed gum, placed bets with bookies, rode in cars with men, stayed out late partying, and kept a pet snake named Emily Spinach, which she often wore wrapped around one arm and took to parties. Her father President Theodore Roosevelt once said of her “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”

Alice was 17 when her father took office in 1901 following the assassination of President William McKinley, and she became an instant celebrity and fashion icon. She was known for her quick wit and acid tongue. Of her quotable quotations, her most famous “If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me” found its way to a pillow on her settee. She informed President Lyndon B. Johnson that she wore wide-brimmed hats so he couldn’t kiss her. And when a well-known Washington senator was discovered to have been having an affair with a young woman less than half his age, Mrs. Longworth quipped, “You can’t make a soufflé rise twice.”

Annie Edson Taylor and her cat

Annie Edson Taylor

Annie Edson Taylor shot to fame in 1901, when, on her 63rd birthday, she became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Taylor used a custom-made barrel for her trip, constructed of oak and iron and padded with a mattress. Two days before Taylor’s own attempt, a domestic cat was sent over the Horseshoe Falls in her barrel to test its strength. Contrary to rumours at the time, the cat survived the plunge.

On October 24, 1901, the barrel was put over the side of a rowboat, and Taylor climbed in, along with her lucky heart-shaped pillow. After screwing down the lid, friends used a bicycle tire pump to compress the air in the barrel. The hole used for this was plugged with a cork, and Taylor was set adrift near the American shore, south of Goat Island.

Rescuers reached her barrel shortly after the plunge. Taylor was discovered to be alive and relatively uninjured. The trip itself took less than twenty minutes, but it was some time before the barrel was actually opened…

 

Check out our Pinterest board for A New Era, for more images and video clips.

The New Art

Detail of an Art Nouveau cupboard door designed by Eugène Gaillard, with characteristic ‘whiplash’ motif

Debussy represented a new era for French music, but the country was also at the cutting edge of other artforms as the 19th century bled into the 20th. Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas and numerous others all produced shimmering visual equivalents of Debussy’s refracted impressions (though Debussy hated the term ‘impressionism’ being applied to his music).

Perhaps the truly modern works being created in France during this time, though, came in the field of decorative arts, where Art Nouveau had its brief but brightest flowering.

Art Nouveau was in part a reaction to industrialisation. The natural world, with flowing, organic lines, was the inspiration, as was the Far East, particularly Japan.

In 1901 the École de Nancy (Nancy School) was formed by a group of artists and designers to further the interests of those working in the Art Nouveau style. Its first president was Émile Gallé, who worked mostly in glass. Gallé’s revolution was to meld centuries-old techniques with modern innovations. And it was not enough for pieces to be functional; they had to be beautiful, too. Gallé’s were, stunningly so. His works of layered glass were miracles of light and shade, and often revealed themselves fully only when illuminated.

Gallé vase, c.1896-98

Sadly, Gallé, who died in 1904, never heard Debussy’s La Mer, which wasn’t completed until the following year, and in any case may not have made it to provincial Nancy for some time after that.

René Lalique, though, was a Parisian, like Debussy bred if not quite born (both moved to Paris as young children), and would have been up to date with all the latest happenings in the music world. Lalique came to be known as the greatest glass worker after Gallé – and arguably greater than Gallé himself – but in 1905 Lalique was still primarily a jeweller. He was no slouch at that, either, and his work vied with the exquisite but more conservative wares of Cartier to be seen adorning France’s great and good.

A Lalique pendant of c.1898 depicting Sarah Bernhardt as Mélissande in the play La Princesse Lointaine. It was sold in 2009 by Christies for US$554,500

Like Gallé, Lalique was obsessed with nature, beauty and the highest levels of craftsmanship. But unlike Cartier pieces, which were often festooned with the finest diamonds, Lalique’s jewellery could have little intrinsic value, constructed using glass and enamel, with precious or semi-precious stones used only for what they contributed to the overall design. The overall design was inevitably breathtaking. As a result, and despite the absence of showy glitter, Lalique’s work was highly sought after and worn by the most fashionable Parisians – among them the great actress Sarah Bernhardt.

The company René Lalique founded still exists and continues to make high-quality items for well-heeled Parisians – so if you have a couple of thousand euro to spend on sofa cushions, you know where to go.

 

Check out our Pinterest board for A New Era, for more images and video clips.

Debussy: La Mer (1905)

Claude Debussy

Debussy’s composition of La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre or simply La Mer (The Sea) started in 1903 and was completed and premiered in 1905.

As a young boy, Debussy’s parents had plans for him to become a sailor. Debussy himself even commented on his fond childhood memories of the beauties of the sea. However, as an adult composing La Mer, he rarely visited the sea itself, but drew inspiration from art, “preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature…” to the real thing.

La Mer was initially not well received – partly because of inadequate rehearsal and partly because of Parisian outrage over Debussy’s having recently left his first wife for the singer Emma Bardac. But it soon became one of Debussy’s most admired and frequently performed orchestral works, and became more so in the ensuing century.

1905…

“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity”.
– Albert Einstein

Bloody Sunday

On 22 January, the Bloody Sunday massacre of Russian demonstrators, at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg took place, triggering the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905. Unarmed, peaceful demonstrators were fired upon by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched to present a petition to the Tsar Nichoals II. The number of casualties is uncertain but moderate estimates average around 1,000 killed or wounded. Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony is subtitled “The Year 1905” in commemoration of the event.

The New Zealand national ruby union team of 1905 were the first to tour outside Australasia, visiting the British Isles, France and the USA. Their opening game was against Devon whom they defeated 55–4, and then went on to defeat every other English team they played, plus Ireland, Scotland and the English national team. Their only defeat was to Wales. The tour of Britain went on to achieve legendary status within the rugby world. They scored 976 points and conceded only 59, and thus set the standard for all subsequent All Black sides. The tour also saw the first use of the “All Blacks” name and established New Zealand’s reputation as a world class rugby nation.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas, Nevada was founded in May 1905. The city, which bills itself as ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World’, now attracts more than 38 million visitors per year, and is the home of seventeen of the 20 biggest hotels in the U.S.

1905 was also the annus mirabilis of Albert Einstein, who published the papers which lay the foundations of quantum physics, introduced the special theory of relativity, explained Brownian motion, and established mass-energy equivalence.

Also in 1905…

The Cullinan Diamond making the centre piece of the Sceptre with the Cross

The largest gem-quality diamond ever found, the Cullinan Diamond was discovered near Pretoria, South Africa in January 1905. The 3,106.75 carat sparkler was split and cut into 7 major stones and 96 smaller stones with the largest two set respectively into the Sceptre with the Cross and the Imperial State Crown of the British Crown Jewels. Legend has it that in 1905, transport of the diamond from South Africa to England posed a huge security problem. Detectives from London were placed on a steamboat that was rumoured to carry the stone, but this was a diversionary tactic. The stone on that ship was a fake, meant to attract those who would be interested in stealing it. The actual diamond was sent to England in a plain box via parcel post… albeit registered!

London football clubs Chelsea F.C. and Charlton Athletic F.C. were both founded in 1905.

The play The Scarlet Pimpernel opened at the New Theatre in London and began a run of 122 performances and numerous revivals.  The title character, Sir Percy Blakeney, represents the original “hero with a secret identity” that inspired subsequent literary creations such as Don Diego de la Vega (El Zorro) and Bruce Wayne (Batman).

Born in 1905

Actors Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Henry Fonda, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, French couturier Christian Dior, Austrian singer Maria von Trapp and All Black George Nepia were all born in 1905.

Check out our Pinterest board for A New Era, for more images and video clips.

Austro-Germanic Art in 1903: Expression, Secession and Romance

While Schoenberg is considered an Expressionist composer, Pelleas und Melisande pre-dates that movement; and although he once claimed that “my music is not lovely”, Pelleas is, and much too pretty to be considered a work of Expressionism. For starters there are tunes – lovely ones – tipping their hats to the Romanticism of Mahler and Richard Strauss, though if you listen hard you can just about hear Schoenberg cracking his knuckles in preparation for an assault on tonality.

Wounded Amazon by Franz von Stuck

Austro-German art of 1903, when Pelleas was composed, was in a similarly liminal state, suspended between the past and thefuture. Works such as Franz von Stuck’s ‘Wounded Amazon’ clung both to convention and the mythological subjects so popular during the 19th century, and yet within only a year or two intense young men such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were forging their own angsty, Expressionist paths.*

At around the same time the Viennese ‘Secessionist’ school of artists, established in opposition to Austrian academic art, was approaching its peak. The leading artist of the group was Gustav Klimt, whose ornamental style was anything but academic. He was no stranger to the world of music, either. In 1902 he created the ‘Beethoven Frieze’, a mural that was part of an exhibition paying tribute to Beethoven. Thirty-four metres long and two metres high, Klimt’s frieze was a visual interpretation of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.

The Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt

Birch Forest by Klimt

In 1903 Klimt produced ‘Birch Forest’, a work that is more concerned with representing an emotion than an actual landscape. One of several forest paintings Klimt made around this time, it sold in 2006 for US$40 million.

* As a musical aside, Kokoschka had a torrid and often troublesome affair with Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma. According to the www.alma-mahler.at website, she inspired 450 of the artist’s works, including his most famous painting, ‘Bride of the Wind’ (1913). Creepily, after Alma had left him for the final time, Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll in Mahler’s likeness.

Alma Mahler doll

The 1900s at a glance

In the next concert in the Newstalk ZB Splendour Series we celebrate the melding of brave new artistic directions and established musical languages at the dawn of a new century.

On Thursday 25th July we perform a programme of works composed between 1900 -1909.

Debussy: La Mer
Glazunov: Violin Concerto in A minor
Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, Op.5

Click to enlarge our timeline of the events in 1900 to give you an overview of what was going on politically and artistically during this time and how the pieces we’re performing fitted in.

Check out our Pinterest board for A New Era, for more images.

To book tickets for this concert, click HERE