Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - Zoltán Simon: The Image of Technology in Selected American Novels of the 1920's

ones. Never before were such wide layers of American society immediately affected in their lifestyles and general standards of living by technology as in the 1920s. As will be seen from some of the examples and statistics below, several important events marked the Twenties not necessarily as a decade of technological breakthroughs, but rather as a period when the changes brought about by progress must have become apparent for the population at large. The 1920s was in many ways the decade of widespread assimilation of technology into American culture. Browsing through the years between 1920 and 1929 in The Chronicle of America, several curious facts, as elements of a larger mosaic, strike the reader's eyes. Census figures in 1920 showed for the first time an urban population larger than a rural one. In his address on July 4, 1926, on the 150th anniversary of the United States, novelist Sherwood Anderson remarked: "The machine (has caused) the herding of men into towns and cities [...] . Minds began to be standardized as were the clothes men wore" (qtd. in Clifton 631). Motorization was undoubtedly one of the most conspicuous changes in the country. By 1920, Americans owned 8 million cars; in other terms, for every automobile there were two horses in the country. With 24 million automobiles (78% of the world's cars) registered by 1927, this proportion was very soon reversed (Lewis and Goldstein 142). Catering to the changing needs of the motoring public, the first drive-in restaurant, J. G. Kirby's self-ironically named "Pig-Stand" opened in Dallas, Texas, in 1921. In aviation, the year 1923 saw the first non-stop flight across the American continent; then, in 1927, America celebrated Charles Lindbergh's 33-and-half-hour non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic from New York to Paris. In telecommunications, the first national radio broadcast, the announcement of the results of the presidential elections, occurred in 1920. Between 1920 and 1924 the number of registered radios leaped from 2,000 to 2.5 million. These facts and figures are but arbitrarily chosen examples of the very rapid quantitative changes that took place in the decade, yet they clearly illustrate the nature of the impact that the overwhelming presence of technology must have had on the'generation of the 1920s: technology 48