[The Hauge, Netherlands – 10:01AM, 8th of May, 1928]
The opening day of the 1928 World Fair was, in retrospect, probably the closest thing I had ever experienced to walking through my own laboratory after someone had multiplied it by several thousand and then put admission tickets on the door.
There were people everywhere. Thousands of them, probably tens of thousands before the day was over, pouring through the gates and spreading across the enormous exhibition grounds. Flags hung from buildings, banners advertised companies that had barely existed a few years earlier, brass bands were playing somewhere in the distance, and every few seconds there seemed to be another burst of applause as some dignitary unveiled another machine that was supposed to represent the future. The entire place had been designed to make people feel as though they had stepped into tomorrow.
The slightly embarrassing part was that I had helped build quite a lot of said tomorrow.
Charlotte was on my arm, as usual, because she had decided that walking was an activity that other people could perform on her behalf. She was two years old, perfectly capable of walking when she wanted to, but there were simply too many things to look at, and apparently being carried gave her a better view. I had dressed her appropriately for the occasion, which mostly meant making sure she wasn't wearing anything I would be annoyed about getting covered in sweets, and she had spent the first five minutes staring at the enormous entrance arch with the expression of someone who had absolutely no idea what it was but had decided that it was interesting anyway.
"Big," she said quietly.
I looked up at the arch.
"Yes," I said. "Very big."
She looked at it again.
"Mm."
"That is a fairly comprehensive review."
She ignored me.
The opening ceremony itself was rather more elaborate than I would have preferred. There were speeches, naturally. There were politicians congratulating themselves on the progress of civilisation, businessmen congratulating themselves on their foresight, and several men who had absolutely nothing to do with any of it congratulating themselves on being invited. I stood through most of it while Charlotte alternated between looking at the crowd and trying to reach the ribbon hanging across the entrance.
Eventually the speeches ended, the ribbon was cut, and the fair officially opened.
And then everyone started moving.
My first stop was the industrial pavilion.
I had been invited to open several of the exhibits myself, which I found mildly amusing. There was something inherently strange about standing beside a machine you had spent years designing and listening to someone introduce you as though you were some visiting dignitary rather than the man who had been awake at three in the morning swearing at the prototype because the bloody thing wouldn't work.
The first exhibit was synthetic rubber.
It was probably the least visually impressive thing in the entire building. There was no enormous machine, no dramatic explosion of steam, and no polished automobile. Just samples of rubber laid out beneath glass, various industrial components, tyres, seals, hoses and sheets of material.
But I knew exactly how important it was. I picked up one of the sample sheets.
"This," I said to the small crowd gathered around me, "is rubber without a rubber tree."
There was a murmur. I smiled. "Or, more accurately, rubber made from chemical feedstocks rather than harvested from a plantation."
A reporter immediately began writing.
The exhibit demonstrated several different formulations, because there wasn't really a single thing called synthetic rubber. Different chemical structures produced different combinations of elasticity, resistance to heat, resistance to oil and resistance to wear. That meant we could start designing rubber for specific purposes rather than simply taking whatever nature happened to provide and trying to make it work.
And that was the real point of the exhibit.
We were beginning to manufacture materials according to what we wanted them to do.
The next pavilion was considerably more crowded.
Photography.
I knew exactly why.
The first unified colour film was sitting behind glass.
Kodachrome.
I'd spent tireless months getting it right. Not merely making colour photographs possible, because people had already managed that, but making a practical colour film in which the three colour records were incorporated into a single film system rather than requiring photographers to juggle separate plates or layers and pray that everything lined up correctly.
I had a camera set up beside the display.
A little further away was a screen showing examples.
The difference was immediately obvious.
People stopped talking when the first image appeared.
It wasn't merely that it was in colour. Colour photography had existed in various forms already. It was the fact that the colours looked natural. Faces looked like faces. Grass looked green rather than some bizarre approximation of green. Red clothing was actually red. Blue skies were blue.
People had spent generations seeing the world through black and white photographs. Suddenly there was a window that looked much more like the world itself.
There was something strangely satisfying about seeing people react to it. Not because I needed them to appreciate the technical achievement, but because I knew what it meant. Colour film wasn't just a novelty. It meant science, journalism, medicine, education, art and eventually ordinary family photographs could all become more vivid. Within a few decades people would look back at black-and-white photographs and think of them as incomplete windows into the past.
I knew that because I'd already seen it.
Then we moved on.
The next exhibit was one of the ones I was perhaps most proud of precisely because nobody looking at it would understand how significant it was.
I listened for a moment.
He was doing a much better job than I would have.
Charlotte looked at the stockings. "Mm."
I laughed. "That's about the extent of the explanation needed."
We continued.
The food pavilion was where Charlotte finally became genuinely interested.
The first frozen-food displays were arranged behind glass, with packages of vegetables, fruit, meat and other products kept at temperatures that would have seemed ridiculous to most households only a few years earlier.
The concept itself wasn't new. People had frozen food before. The real revolution was making controlled freezing, preservation and distribution practical on a large scale.
I stood in front of one display and looked at the neatly packaged food.
This was one of those inventions that would eventually become so ordinary that nobody would think of it as an invention at all.
That was usually how you knew something had succeeded.
A machine could be revolutionary when it was first unveiled. Fifty years later, nobody cared because it was simply the thing everyone owned.
Frozen food would do that.
Instead of depending entirely upon the local harvest, salting, smoking, drying or buying whatever happened to survive transport, you could preserve food through freezing and move it over considerably greater distances. That meant seasonal produce could eventually become available outside its normal season. It meant less waste. It meant supermarkets decades later could have enormous quantities of food sitting in freezers waiting for someone to buy them.
She reached out and touched a piece of ice, recoiling back as if it had bit her. She looked deeply offended by this development.
I carried on walking.
The next hall was much louder.
Cinema.
There was a queue outside a theatre that seemed to stretch halfway across the pavilion, and the moment I saw it I understood why. Moving pictures had existed for decades, but the industry was changing rapidly. Longer films, proper feature-length productions, synchronised sound, better projection systems and improved recording techniques were transforming cinema from a novelty into something that could dominate popular entertainment.
The first full-length film being shown was already drawing enormous crowds.
There was a queue stretching almost absurdly far outside the entrance, and I had to admit that I understood why. The film they were showing was The Jazz Singer, the 1927 picture that had become the great demonstration of synchronised speech and singing. It wasn't technically the first film to have sound, and it wasn't even entirely a talking picture; most of it was still presented in the old silent-film fashion, with intertitles and musical accompaniment. But there were moments when Al Jolson actually spoke and sang, his voice synchronised with his movements on the screen, and those moments had been enough to convince an entire industry that the age of silent cinema was coming to an end.
We found our seats somewhere near the middle of the theatre. Charlotte sat on my lap, because naturally she wasn't going to sit in a chair like a normal person when there was a perfectly good opportunity to climb onto her father. She looked around at the darkened room with considerable interest, particularly at the projector behind us, which she couldn't actually see properly but could hear making its mechanical noises.
The story itself was fairly straightforward. Jolson played Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a strict Jewish cantor who expected his son to follow the family tradition and become a cantor himself. Jakie, however, wanted to become a jazz singer. His father disapproved of the music, of the career and, essentially, of the entire direction his son wanted his life to take. Jakie eventually left home, pursued his career and became successful, while his relationship with his father deteriorated badly. The story eventually brings him back home when his father is dying, leaving Jakie caught between the life he'd built for himself and the family he'd left behind.
It was melodramatic.
Very melodramatic.
I sat there watching it with Charlotte on my lap and found myself having a rather peculiar experience.
I knew exactly how important this film was.
I knew what it represented. I knew what would happen to cinema over the next few years. I knew that within a remarkably short period, talking pictures would stop being an exciting novelty and become the standard. Studios would rebuild their sound stages. Actors would have to learn how to perform differently. Cinemas would have to install new equipment. Silent stars would suddenly discover that having a beautiful face wasn't necessarily enough if the microphone didn't like your voice.
And yet, watching it in 1928, I couldn't help thinking:
That's it?
I had grown up in a world of films that cost hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, with computer-generated cities, spaceships, monsters, explosions, simulated physics and enough visual effects to make the entire thing look like a fever dream produced by an extremely wealthy lunatic.
Compared with that, The Jazz Singer was almost painfully simple.
The camera barely moved.
The sets looked like sets.
The image was black and white.
There was no CGI because, obviously, there was no CGI.
There weren't even particularly complicated visual effects.
And then Jolson spoke.
The reaction from the audience was immediate.
People actually gasped.
I looked around the theatre instead of at the screen.
That was the impressive part.
Not the film itself.
The people watching it.
For them, this wasn't a primitive version of something they had already seen. This was the first time many of them had sat in a cinema and watched a human being on the screen open his mouth and heard that same human being speak. The technology was effectively disappearing in front of them. They weren't thinking about synchronisation, electrical recording, amplification or the mechanics of the Vitaphone system. They were just hearing a man on a screen talk.
Charlotte jumped slightly at the first burst of singing.
I put an arm around her.
"It's all right."
She stared at the screen.
Then she looked back at me.
She watched for another few seconds. She looked at me as though I was somehow responsible for this development.
There were moments where I could see exactly why it had captured people's imagination. Jolson had an enormous stage presence, and when the sound worked, it worked brilliantly. The singing suddenly had an immediacy that silent cinema simply couldn't reproduce. You weren't reading an intertitle telling you that someone had begun singing. You heard the voice.
That was the trick.
The technology didn't have to be perfect.
It just had to be different enough.
And this was different enough.
When the film ended, the audience applauded loudly. Charlotte didn't join in, because she was two and apparently hadn't yet developed an opinion on the cultural significance of synchronised sound. She simply stared at the screen after the final image disappeared.
I carried her out of the theatre.
"Well?"
She rested her head against my shoulder, now tired from a long day exploring. I laughed. "That's probably the most concise film review I've ever heard."
As we stepped back into the sunlight, I looked over the enormous fairgrounds. Outside the cinema, people were already talking excitedly about what they'd just seen. Somewhere inside the exhibition, engineers were demonstrating synthetic rubber. Scientists were showing off new plastics and fibres. Photographers were staring at colour images. Food companies were demonstrating frozen products. Electrical engineers were showing machines that would eventually become household objects.
We walked through another section displaying advances in electrical engineering. More efficient motors, improved generators, household appliances, electrical lighting, communication equipment and new methods of controlling machines. Some were things I had personally pushed forward; others had emerged from the work of people who had taken an idea and run with it in directions I hadn't expected.
That was how technological progress was supposed to work.
I walked past an exhibit showing improved telecommunications equipment and found myself stopping.
People were speaking into microphones and hearing their voices reproduced elsewhere.
Charlotte didn't care.
She had found a machine with a large rotating wheel.
She pointed, so I approached closer, and she seemed satisfied with that.
We continued into the transport hall.
There were automobiles, engines, aircraft components, improved railway equipment and countless smaller innovations that had accumulated around them. The aviation displays were particularly impressive. Aircraft had gone from being fragile machines that barely seemed capable of staying in the air to increasingly practical vehicles with enclosed cockpits, better engines, improved navigation and much more reliable construction.
Charlotte pointed upwards at a massive model of the Wright brothers' aircraft hanging above the crowd. I smiled and kept walking.
This all felt like magic, but then again maybe it was. We as a species had made the impossible so ordinary that a child could point at it and simply ask what it was called.