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Machines

In the 20th century, life became more comfortable. It was impossible to imagine modern life without machines. Science and technology made a huge impact, and what is astonishing is how early in the century some of the major inventions occurred.

Specialised expertise

Even more significant, perhaps, was the cumulative and accelerating pace of change. This was especially true from the 1960s when new inventions were increasingly marketed as consumer items and thus were felt to be necessities of life, at first in the West and then all over the world. At the same time, the negative environmental impact of consumer society led to new anxieties about the degradation of nature, the extinction of species and adverse global climate change.

In this century, there were more scientists and scientific institutions than ever before. But research was unequally spread around the world, with the United States, Europe and Japan having the most resources. The areas of scientific expertise became more and more specialised, to the extent that many people could no longer understand what scientists did.

Mad scientists

This, plus the justifiable suspicion that military bodies were experimenting with new weapons of mass destruction, led to the prevalence of images of mad scientists in popular culture. This ran right through the century, beginning with Fritz Lang's 1926 film Metropolis and extending at least to 1963 with Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. Perhaps the most poetic expression of this theme was the fascination with the Frankenstein myth.

For every late 20th-century home that was lit and heated by a nuclear power station, there were individuals who worried about the threat of nuclear annihilation of the world, especially during the Cold War of the 1950s and early 1960s.

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