100 Years Ago

My father was born on January 3, 1907 in the little Hamlet of Magnetewan. One hundred years seems to be a milepost, one of those periods of time that we use to measure humankind’s visit to this planet. For the planet, we use millions of years as a measuring stick, yet for this one man, now deceased some ten years, a hundred years would sit well with him.

I am sure his grandchildren think of his birth time as some mystical era, a time when so much of the world as they know it today did not exist or was only an idea in some inventor or scientist’s mind. His great-grandchildren may never fully comprehend those days. It was the time of the steam engine - the gasoline engine only an evolving toy for the rich. It was a time when the telegraph and telephone could only reach a little outback settlement like Magnetewan on pairs of copper wire. It was a time when radio waves were only beginning to fill the ether, a magical time when men would be taking to the air with more and more confidence in their ability to fly. It was a time when a flush toilet and running water in the home were unheard of in the backwoods settlements of northern Ontario.

In this time of the steam engine, Dad’s family learned to harness the power of boiling water, using it to power their steamboats, first on the Magnetewan and then on the Pickerel River. They used the power of steam to run a sawmill, to cut the oak that would form the frame of their new steamboat, The Kawigamog, and only when the planks were cut for the boat would they saw a few boards for their home. It was a time when you learned how and why a steam engine worked, so that when it broke you could fix it.

By the time Dad was fifteen, the era of steam had ended for small applications like riverboats. Now, the gasoline engine was more reliable, more powerful and portable enough to drive trucks and cars. It was now commonplace to see little airplanes in Port Loring but Dad would not fly in one until his sixtieth year, and he loved it. In a matter of two generations, his grandson would be flying a fighter faster than the speed of sound, and although Dad expressed no desire to move so fast, he accepted that as just one more sign of the times.

Radio was with him as he grew up but it was not until he was past his 45th birthday that he would see a television. Dad made the transition from the old cylinder phonographs to the portable tape player, and indeed recorded some of his history on tape, but I am not sure that he would have ever been comfortable driving down the road, talking on a cell phone or picking away at a Blackberry – but then, that would be just another change.

As for computers, I think Dad never did understand them, and at his age, had no desire to try to master the electronic age. It was enough just to use the technology without trying to understand how it worked. It was not like the bad old days when you could tear down the old double-compound engine of the Kawigamog and replace a gasket even if you were several miles down the river. Today, if the hard drive crashes we more than likely throw the damn thing away and get a new one. Who can fix them? Probably the same type of person who could have replaced that gasket on the steam engine …

I wonder what milestones people will use to look back at the hundred years of my era, a time beginning just before the Second World War. Surely, many more changes will come to pass in the next thirty or so years, but will they all be as exciting as the time from 1907 to 2007?