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

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 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

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

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.

 

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

The birth of cinema

Music wasn’t the only art form taking brave new artistic directions at the dawn of the century.  The 1900s saw great strides made in movie making, with the first built for purpose cinemas starting to appear.

The movie theatre was considered a cheaper, simpler way to provide entertainment to the masses (perhaps more so than the theatre or the orchestra) and film became the most popular visual art form of the late Victorian age.

During this period films were silent and short.  Whereas in the very early days of film making motion pictures were seen as a bit of a novelty, during the 1900s they started to be seen as an art form, with a strong narrative structure, special effects and political messages.

Of the thousands of films produced between 1900 – 1910, here’s a few that are considered industry landmarks…

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la Lune), is a 1902 French black-and-white silent science fiction film, based loosely on two popular novels of the time: Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston, and was released by Méliès’s company Star Film. It was extremely popular at the time of its release, and is the best-known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès. It’s also one of the first known science fiction films, and uses innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the Moon’s eye. It was named one of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century by The Village Voice.

 

The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery

The Great Train Robbery (1903)

The Great Train Robbery is an American Western film written, produced, and directed by Edwin S. Porter. 12 minutes long, it is considered a milestone in film making, using a number of innovative techniques including composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting.

Held in high esteem by other film makers even today, The Great Train Robbery has been referenced in many other movies, particularly the final scene where the leader of the bandits fires point blank towards the camera. The final shot is paid homage in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas when Joe Pesci’s character fires a gun at the camera at the end of the movie and Ridley Scott also paid homage after the final credits of American Gangster when Denzel Washington’s character in a darkened bar fires a gun into the camera.  It is also believed that the final sequence was the inspiration for the gun barrel sequence in James Bond movies.

Alice in Wonderland (1903)

Alice in Wonderland is a British silent film directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and the first of many movie adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The film is memorable for its use of special effects, including Alice’s shrinking in the Hall of Many Doors, and in her large size, stuck inside of White Rabbit’s home, reaching for help through a window.

Only one copy of the original film is known to exist, but parts of it are missing. The British Film Institute partially restored the movie and its original film tinting and released it on February 24, 2010.

 

The Story of the Kelly Gang

The Story of the Kelly Gang

The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906)

The Story of the Kelly Gang is an Australian film that traces the life of the legendary infamous outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly (1855–1880). It was written and directed by Charles Tait. The film ran for more than an hour, and was the longest narrative film yet seen in Australia, and the world, and considered to be the first full-length feature film. Its approximate reel length was 4,000 feet (1,200 m). It was first shown at the Athenaeum Hall in Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia on 26 December 1906 and in the UK in January 1908.

One of the real-life gang’s actual suits (probably Joe Byrnes’) was supposedly used in the film.

A Visit to the Seaside (1908))

A Visit to the Seaside was the first successful motion picture in natural colour, filmed with Kinemacolor. Kinemacolor later influenced and replaced by Technicolor, which was used from 1916 to 1952.

This eight minute short film directed by George Albert Smith, showing people going about their everyday lives in the English seaside town of Brighton, is considered to be of high historical importance. George Albert Smith was a member of the ‘Brighton set’, a group of early experimental English filmmakers.

The New Art

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The Beethoven Frieze by Gustav Klimt

Birch Forest by 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

Alma Mahler doll