Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span? Especially if we go back to 1922. Mass communication, mass travel, etc. were all non existent.

Like the first radio stations had just started broadcasting when she was born, now we're all discussing her passing on a communications network that connects the entire globe. Possibly some of us while on flights from one side of the world to the other.

> Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span?

I don't think so. My grandmother was born in 1900 and died in 2003. Cars, airplanes, electricity, radio, TV, computers, space ships, etc..., all were invented or became commonplace in her lifetime. Queen Elizabeth was born between the birth years of my parents, who didn't remember the "horse and buggy days".

Agree with you. The world today is not much different from the world my grandmother left behind, born ~1900 died ~2000.

Arguably it's not particularly different now than, say, 1995 - 2000, which is the half decade of web search indexes (AltaVisa = 1995) and banner ads (1998 = DoubleClick IPO).

Travel, media, appliances, transportation, Internet, perhaps even music and fashion, haven't as fundamentally changed since then.

I would say that massive adoption of smart phones and social media have been pretty big.

It may not be as big of a leap as no computers -> personal computers or no internet -> internet but I wouldn't say that the world is "not much different" than 2000.

Social media in particular has the potential to be extremely disrupting to society. There are things which seem possible that would have been unthinkable in 2000 like the fall of American democracy. And that sort of societal shift requires more than just the internet. It requires a hyper-online society which is enabled by smartphones and social media.

What surprises me is how little technological progress appears to have occurred in the last decade (ie. 2010-2020). I think you'd be hard pressed to name a decade in the past 50 or even 100 years where the technology available to the masses has advanced so little. Note that I'm excluding things that are still mostly at the research stage, like deep learning, advanced language models, etc., since I don't think those have had much effect on people's lives yet.

First Google hit for technology invented in the 1970s:

The Floppy Disk. ... Portable Cassette Player. ... The All-In-One Personal Computer. ... The Cell Phone. ... The VCR. ... The First “Real” Video Game. ... Digital Wristwatches.

1970s maybe.

Not at all, that was the decade personal/home computers first become available. It's also when Steve Jobs founded Apple.

And electronic music took off.

Folks had mobile phones in the 90s. Most folks I worked with had them.

Remember that mobile phones were already "StarTac" sized in 1996:

https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/the-evolution-of-ce...

As for social media, "Eternal September" was in 1993. In fact, I noted my grandmother's perception that people putting their thoughts out there was disruptive. In her mind that, like radio or TV that she saw get invented, this was obviously going to suddenly be everyone. So you're saying she was right. But she'd already seen it in the last millennium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

As for "fall of American Democracy", actually, the 1960s and early 1970s didn't feel a whole lot different from the recent summer of discontent, and remember that the LA Riots were 1992. And for someone around since 1900, 'fall of American democracy' was, at several points, not "unthinkable".

In any case, "social media" hundreds of years ago was called "pamphleteering" and, for example, contributed to French Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer

I think a lot of this depends on where you are standing. In the West, 1900-1990 was a huge difference in life and how it was lived, and less so between 1990 and today.

In many other places of the world 1900-1990 had much less change in day to day life, whereas 1990-today has been a huge change.

The massive changes have just finally been getting spread around to everyone (still unevenly of course)

Dont underestimate recent changes. Your grandma never saw a smartphone, modern electric car, online food ordering, Netflix nor went on a Tinder hoookup. :)

My Russian great-great-grandmother was born in 1898 and died in 1998. She witnessed tsarist Russia, communist Russia and democratic Russia. That was quite an experience. I always was kind of jealous because she could compare the regimes first-hand.

That's quite a way to put it. Someone living through 1908 - 2008 would've also witnessed the start of Putin's autocratic Russia as he manoeuvred to keep power despite ending his second term.

My great grandmother was born in the Habsburg Empire, her daughter in Nazi Germany, her son in communist Poland, she died in modern polish republic. And she never moved an inch, that's how many different rules and governments had southern poland in her lifetime.

She remember the poland of poles in rural areas and germans and jews in the cities, which is how the entirety of eastern Europe looked like up to the urals. So many different languages spoken by populations for centuries.

She never saw a car or listened to a radio as a child and definitely did not have electricity at home till ww2 ended. When she died there were videochats.

I would argue for 1870-1970. Flush toilets, motors and light bulbs, communication networks ( phones in houses, radio ) did not exist before 1870, but were rapidly being deployed in the decade or two before the Queen's birth in 1922..

A book by Robert J. Gordon from 2015, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," goes through this in great and fascinating detail. The life of an everyday American in 1870, starting off with the chamber pot and ending with an early bedtime by candlelight, was hard to even imagine by 1940. As he lays it out , life in that year would be familiar to us: toilets and plumbing, mass media via radio & hardcopy webpage (i.e. newspapers), worldwide communication from home (telephone), refrigeration, etc.

I'd say the time from 1830's to about 1930's was the era of greatest change.

The introduction of trains in the early 1800s literally changed the DNA of England. As people started to regularly traveled 100's of miles away from their villages.

The transatlantic cable was carrying millions of messages by the late 1880s.

American history tends to be written in a bubble. Some people in the U.S.A. were using chamber pots in the 1870s, by the 1870s London had a sewer system.

Too often the U.S.A. plays up a fantasy pioneer past. While in the U.S.A. people tend of talk of the 1860s as a time of pioneers and wagons, in large Western European cities Maxwell's Equations were being discussed in mathematics departments.

My grandmother (1900 - 2000, ish), considered "email" (instant letters) and individual people's ability to "publish" on the web for the world to create and consume what any individual thought, as radical and important.

She considered company websites as fancy brochures, but thought individual access to almost free global publishing was astonishing.

It sounds like your grandmother was able to connect the dots and understand the big picture in her high age impressively well.

I tend to agree with you, if only for that fact that in the span of a single lifetime an individual, as a child, could have stood and watched man fly for the first time, and then as an adult see man land on the Moon.

> Mass communication, mass travel, etc. were all non existent

Telegraphy had allowed current news to rapidly flow around the globe for decades.

True, but the information still had to be conveyed from the nearest telegraph office to your home (the 19th century "last mile problem")

That last mile problem, getting news from telegraphs to people's homes, was solved by newspapers. e.g. The Daily Telegraph[1] is specifically named for that purpose.

They were printing reports from all over the world.

As an example the modern sporting event the Tour de France was started by a newspaper in 1903 and was reported on daily. That wouldn't really have been viable financially without mass communication. In fact the race exists solely to generate those reports.

There's a very good book called The Victorian Internet that covers early mass communication if you're interested[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Telegraph

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet

Weren't there also multiple daily editions of The Times and other newspapers?

I don’t think the monarchs ever worried much about how much underlying work was required for things to happen for them.

That kind of improvement benefits poor people.

It’s like the opposite of tariffs or sanctions: the people at the top are unaffected.

Meanwhile;

> A mix of June and 19th, Juneteenth has become a day to commemorate the end of slavery in America. Despite the fact that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than two years earlier on January 1, 1863, a lack of Union troops in the rebel state of Texas made the order difficult to enforce.

> Some historians blame the lapse in time on poor communication in that era, while others believe Texan slave-owners purposely withheld the information.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/abolition-of-sla...

Had a morning and afternoon post though. For telegrams specifically at least I believe you could pick them up by dropping in on the off-chance too?

Maybe more importantly, broadcast radio had started few years earlier (1919-1920ish)

A timespan anecdote I like: Bertrand Russell watched man land on the moon on tv. He also had his grandfather tell him about meeting with Napoleon.

On the margin, we're comparing 2022 to 1922, 2021-2022 to 1921-1922, &c. There's little question that this span overlaps substantially, probably 80+%, with the 100-year spam of greatest change in humanity, but I think there's a strong argument that, pretty say, 1914-2014 > 1922-2022 (which amounts to that the changes of 1914-1922 were more substantial than those of 2014-2022). Where exactly the optimum is, of course, hard to say, though I do think the 2000s have been on the whole exciting enough that that the next serious cutoffs would be around 1905 or 1903, and not likely in between.

> Arguably the largest change in humanity in a ~100 year span?

1870-1970 (or about that range) probably would be bigger change. That would cover time from before commercial light bulbs to commercial computers[1] and man on the moon. Societally it would include WW1 and the series of Russian revolutions leading to wave of other revolutions in Europe[2], and major advances in Womens' suffrage[3] among other things.

[1] e.g. PDP-8 and S/360

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1917%E2%80%9319...

[3] "The Representation of the People Act 1918 saw British women over 30 gain the vote. Dutch women won the vote in 1919, and American women on August 26, 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage

I would argue that the biggest change came to her parents' generation more or less.

They were born without electricity, and everything it brought, and without cars or planes, and they lived to have pretty much all modern comfort and watch a man on the Moon on TV.

She navigated the changing world, role and importance of the crown across her reign with a lot of intelligence and grace.

A less charitable take could say that she oversaw the decline of the crown and collapse of the empire.

...and of Britain generally.

It's always vague statements like that, or something to the effect of "she witnessed some pretty important events", or "she lived for very long". What did she do exactly, of note, in these 75 years? I still don't know.

I vomited a little after reading that.

Winston Churchill was her first prime minister.

This really is hard to comprehend. We live in more or less a completely different reality then when she was born.

When she was born, the British Empire ruled over a quarter of the world’s population.

It’s even higher now, the commonwealth countries have a population of 2.5 billion (almost 1/3)

The UK monarch doesn't rule over most Commonwealth countries. The monarch only rules over the 15 Commonwealth Realms. For example, India and Pakistan are now republics and the monarch doesn't have a role in their governments. Canada, by contrast, is a monarchy and Commonwealth Realm.

The Commonwealth of Nations an association of countries, but the Commonwealth of Nations does not control the government of any member country (even ceremonially). India and Pakistan are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, but are not Commonwealth Realms.

Iunno, the King of England can barge in whenever he wants and start telling me what to do. That worries me.

the monarch doesn't rule over the UK, they reign

a small but crucial distinction

No longer "ruling" over them though.

> 1929

Actually 1926 but yes, a lot of history in those nearly 100 years.