This is real footage from 126 years ago.
What you are watching is the trottoir roulant, the moving sidewalk, built for the great World's Fair in Paris in 1900.
More than a century ago, three years before the Wright brothers would make the first airplane flight, the city built an electric street that carried you across itself while you simply stood there...
It ran in a loop of around three and a half kilometres, raised on a viaduct above the fairgrounds, with nine stations where you could step on and off.
And it had a clever design: two moving platforms side by side, one going at walking pace and one faster, so you could step onto the slow one first, then onto the quick one, and ride the whole circuit in about twenty-six minutes without taking a single step.
Nearly fifty million people came to that fair, and for most of them it was the first time they had ever moved through a place without taking a step.
The very first moving walkway had appeared seven years earlier, at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, built by the same designers. But the Paris version was longer, faster, and far more sophisticated, and it was here that the world truly fell in love with the idea.
It astonished people. The thought that the ground itself could carry you felt like magic, like something out of a dream of the future. They even called it the Rue de l'Avenir: the Street of the Future.
Thomas Edison sent a crew to film it, which is why we can still watch it today...
USA. A backyard. The sun was going down, and a man named Dale stood before a black iron drum, feeding it wood, the way you feed a fire that must not die before morning.
"Brisket," he said. "Gonna be a long one. You're welcome to keep me company."
Keep him company. He said it the way a man mentions the weather. But I heard the truth beneath the words, the way you hear a temple bell beneath the wind. He was not inviting me to a meal. He was asking me to stand a vigil. To hold the sacred fire through the dark with him, two men against the whole of the night, so that something worthy could be born by dawn. My heart rose like a banner going up a pole.
I bowed, deep enough that he would feel the weight of what I was accepting. He nodded back and adjusted a vent.
He gestured at a folding chair. "Sit if you want, man. Gonna be a while."
I did not sit. A sentinel does not sit while the fire still lives. He looked at me a moment, then nodded slowly, the way you nod at a thing you have decided not to worry about. I took that nod as the first honor of the night.
Where I come from, when a thing of great worth is being made, you do not leave it. You stand the whole night beside it. You do not fill the silence with talk, because the silence itself is the labor.
So I stood. I said nothing. He said nothing. We watched the smoke leave the drum and climb into the purple sky, and for the first time in this loud and generous country, I felt completely understood.
After an hour, without looking at me, he pressed a cold can into my hand. I received it in both palms and bowed my head a fraction, the way one receives a canteen passed down the line between sentries who both know the night is far from over. I did not drink quickly. One does not drink quickly on watch.
A neighbor wandered over with a beer, saw me standing at attention beside the drum, and asked Dale, low, if I was doing alright.
"He's good," Dale said. "He's keeping me company."
He had vouched for me. Before his own people. I would have walked into the fire for him right then.
After two hours, he spoke. Once.
"Smell that bark setting up?"
I closed my eyes and breathed in, and I will tell you honestly, my chest went tight. Because it did. It smelled like patience. It smelled like a thing no king and no army could hurry, however mighty. "I do," I said, and I said it like an oath.
We did not speak again for a long while. A dog came and lay across both our feet, choosing neither of us, guarding the both of us. The stars came out over the fence and the cheap string lights and the plastic chairs, and I thought, with my whole heart, that there are grand temples in this world holding less holiness than this tired man's backyard.
Near midnight his wife leaned out the door. "Dale, you two have been standing there four hours. You know you can sit down, right?"
"We're good, hon," Dale said.
We're good. Four words. He had spoken for the both of us, claimed me as his brother of the watch, and waved away all comfort in a single breath, and he did it without once taking his eyes off the fire. I have heard generals give long speeches that carried less.
A fire kept alone is only a chore. A fire kept together is an oath.
When the meat was finished, near dawn, he cut the very first slice and laid it in my hands. The guest. The man who had done nothing but stand beside him and honor the work.
I have eaten at tables that cost a season's wages, served by men trained from boyhood. None of it ever fed me the way that one slice did, handed over by a weary man at sunrise who had decided, hours before and without a single word, that I was worth keeping the watch with.
I do not know Dale's family name. I would stand the whole night for him again tomorrow, and count myself honored.
This guy captured Union Pacific Big Boy 4014 passing over the Tunkhannock Viaduct.
The viaduct was completed in 1915 and was once the largest concrete bridge in the world.
Big Boy 4014 was built in 1941 and weighs around 1.2 million pounds.
This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve..👍🏽
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."