> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
"Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.
"Some" is doing a ton of work in this sentence describing 19th century children.
Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single-stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in red and white PVC plastic, was installed under the house, in ceilings, in wall cavities and elsewhere by yours truly to enable us perform all sorts of electrical tasks—door bells, for mother to signal us to come to dinner, etc.
Isn't that standard kids' stuff anymore? The thought of an electrician being called to fix these Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson-type installations would have been preposterous. If No.-1 son wasn't about say to change a battery then my parents would do it themselves.
I was super confused as that an easy thing to do(loosen a bolt, adjust height and tighten the bolt). Turns out lots of parents don't allow their kids to touch their tools or tinker or do anything like that.
I was very fortunate that my parents encouraged me to do such things. E.g. take apart things to put them together but it doesn't surprise me why lots of people have all the creativity and curiosity purged from them from an early age.
That is a contributor, but not the only one. Helicopter parenting by itself also shares some of the blame.
1. Parents say the street / road is too dangerous.
2. Parents drive their kids everywhere.
3. They induce more road usage, demand more road infrastructure. They move to suburbs which are more car centric, force more pedestrianized areas (downtowns) to become more car centric.
4. Places become less walkable, and more dangerous for people outside of a car.
5. Go to 1.
Some of helicopter parenting is mostly over imagined or exaggerated fears ("crime", being abducted by predators which is rather rare, etc), but fear of car death is in fact valid given it is a leading cause of child death (was number 1 until this year gun death became #1). The unfortunate reality is the very act parents in the US take to make it safe for their children perpetuates the issue the ecogecko video I talk about has.
Given at this point no one will let their children be the first to face danger, likely the issue will not ameliorate itself naturally, and government action (pedestrianization, change of streetscapes, change of landuse and zoning, etc) is required.
Anyway, rereading your post, cars aren't the only factor in childhood stunting in the US. I'm not sure because I haven't researched outside of the car centric bits (that is supported in research) but it does feel like a culture wide issue in the US.
About the self-reinforcement: London is a great example of how to evade this trend.
You see, London pedestrians seem almost suicidal. They often cross the road without even looking. In addition, by law traffic-lights in the UK are only advisory for pedestrians: crossing the road when the lights are red is legal and common.
Individually, each 'suicidal' pedestrian endangers their own life. But collectively they train drivers to watch out and make London safer for everyone.
It feels like some sort of inversion of the tragedy of the commons.
(London still has helicopter parents. At least more than they used to have in previous decades. But the feedback loop seems weaker than what you describe for the US.)
You're right, encouraging kids to explore the world at an early age is all important for their development. As a kid I was a past master at pulling all sorts of things apart and somewhat less successful at putting them back together again. And from that I learned a great amount about how stuff worked ('hands-on' at a very young age I reckon is essential to get the feel and measure of stuff).
My parents never discouraged me from playing with all sorts of rather strange things—except perhaps in my preschool years when I started rummaging around amongst the inner workings of our large console radio set in the lounge room. At the age of about four or five my mother took exception after I discovered that touching the top cap [aka grid-1] of one of its valves (tubes) caused a very loud humming noise (she came bounding into the room somewhat alarmed to find No.-1 son arm-deep amongst the electrics).
By that age I'd already become an inveterate collector of junk—everything from screws, nuts and bolts to discarded power pole wire and insulators.
Once I found an old transformer out of a radio set that had green silk-like insulation on its windings (which I found fascinating) and in the evening when my parents told me to stop playing with it I disobeyed the order and hid it in my bed (I know, a very strange kid). Now, you can imagine the furore and trouble I was in when this large metal object came crashing to the floor in the early hours of the morning waking up the whole household.
I cannot envisage how horrible my childhood would have been had my parents forbidden me from following my natural instincts (as strange and as odd as they may have seemed).
I'm sure many other parents would have been much less tolerant of my strange predilections. In hindsight, I reckon my only saving grace was that my father was an engineer.
This already is a massive difference. Large majority of children in the 19th century did not have any access to electricity, let alone knowing how to fashion an electric bell.
Broadly, the reason for why some 20th C. kids would have had access to less information is that they were more protected from dangers than those in 19th C. (and in some ways that's problematic when it comes to learning). Also, clearly, the types of information available in each era would have been different—and this difference would have been accentuated depending on which part of each century we're referring to.
The 19th C.—being the height of the Industrial Revolution—change came thick and fast, so it's almost superfluous to say kids' knowledge of electricity at the turn of the 20th C. would have been much greater than at the beginning of the 19th however this difference wasn't anywhere near as stark at other times throughout the 19th C.
This is best illustrated by example and for that I'll use a book published in 1858 by Elisha Noyce titled The Boys Book of Industrial Information. https://archive.org/details/boysbookofindust00noyc
So by 1858 enough information was known about electricity to include technical aspects about it including its industrial applications such as electroplating, p129, and the telegraph, pp273-280 in a kids' book. I'd also posit that some 20 years later (by say 1880) with the coming together of electrical engineering—telephone, electric motors, generators, transatlantic cables, theory by Maxwell, Wheatstone et al, that much more information about the subject would have been available to kids.
Noyce's book was a true eye-opener to me when I came across it some two to three decades ago, so much so that I now truly regret not having a copy of it as a kid. I know I would have gained a great amount of useful knowledge from it despite the fact that it was published a century before my time.
Whilst I had access to more modern texts they didn't provide the information in such a useful and meaningful way. Moreover, much of that information is still very relevant and valuable today. For instance, I refer you to pp57-58 on the dangers of lead and lead poisoning, therein Noyce issues a stark warning especially so with respect to white lead as used in paint.
(This advice would have been invaluable to boys who would have gone into industries where they'd be exposed to such dangers. It also infomes us that knowledge of and concerns about bad and dangerous working conditions of the era may have been better understood at the time than some modern history books would have us believe.)
Keep in mind this warning was in a book for boys written to provide them with practical and useful information—not published in some erudite scientific publication. The fact that by 1858 the dangers of lead had filtered down not only to ordinary people but also to their kids makes the failure of governments and those knowledgeable of the facts to act in a decisive way over the forthcoming century all the more tragic (when I first read Noyce's warning I was quite horrified that so little action had been taken until recent decades).
As you see, with actual information to hand things seem a little more nuanced.
I well understand what you say having lived in a crowded part of Europe for a time. It made me all the more appreciative of the fact that I grew up in a big home with a large front and back yard and that our house was only a few hundred metres from bushland.
Nevertheless, in some ways I envy you living in the Côte d’Azur. That is one of my most favorite parts of Europe.
Well, practically so. My mother had a massive copper (I think) cowbell at the bottom of the stairs to signal us. All it required was the muscle energy to give the 2-kilogram monstrosity a little shake.
It worked marvelously and almost always the dog would arrive there first (it was usually my job to feed the dog before our food was served).
And of course, the bell doesn't have to make much sense. It doesn't have to work better than yelling, if the kids just like having it around.
Mistrusting electricity is a different story, but that's not the title of the article.
The hope is that our abstractions are not too good, and the clever kids manage to bash them into something that does what their imagination wants.
The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... that's our problem in a nutshell.
Two days ago we returned home from a short trip and when we turned on the tap for the first time the water pressure seemed unusually high for 5-10 seconds before returning to normal. I would have thought nothing of it except that about fifteen years ago I had experienced the same phenomenon after installing a water pressure booster pump in our house and so I learned the hard way about the need for thermal expansion tanks in modern domestic plumbing [1] and so I knew right away that our tank had failed and needed to be replaced. It's a pretty trivial DIY project, but only if you do it before your pipes burst. I suspect most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion tank.
[1] https://homeinspectioninsider.com/thermal-expansion-tanks-in...
I suspect that if you did surveys every year going back to the 19th century, in every single one of them the majority of people would have never heard of a thermal expansion tank.
But I'll bet most people could tell you why they had separate hot and cold water taps. (These things are related BTW.)
https://st.hzcdn.com/fimgs/b0f25dc10b76dbe4_6198-w500-h666-b...
where the hot and cold water come out in two different places.
They also made them do it standing up with an awkwardly shaped bulb, and only a single wire, so the task was basically impossible, without a cutter and/or some tape.
Still, people should know why they are failing.
Of course, they are being caught out of context and are guessing the "rules" of the "game".
The one scene where a student appears to succeed (this clip is spliced in after the segment where the professor says "it's not the case [it's not a trick question]") is not with the light bulb they were given (they essentially say "here, I can show you, see, with a small bulb I would do this and it works", laughing which to me indicates they didn't get it done with the initially given large bulb).
But maybe not? Maybe they were given several bulbs to choose from. And yeah some people clearly didn't figure out the basics ("I need two wires"). The others, unclear, they showed short cuts of them fumbling around (possibly after failing a few times) but they might have already tried the right approach before that.
The core issue with the video is that it doesn't establish a base line. What is it they expected from the students? That they identified they cannot do it with just any bulb or any battery before saying yes? I don't think so, based on the professor interview that really seems to imply that the folks should know how to do it (and get it done).
If there was a way to do it they should have shown. They just go on to folks saying "see, we need to teach the basics better" and I still don't know how it connects to the "experiment".
The way it stands it really does seem to be designed to make the graduates fail the test without making clear (to the viewer at least) what the test really was.
I mean at this point I'm not even clear if the reporters were the stupid ones not realizing it cannot be done. Again, they didn't show it. It's more likely they did actually make it impossible / pose a trick question.
I am not doubting the professor as much. They probably conducted an actual experiment that showed a significant number of subjects (was it MIT grads though) weren't able to accomplish it despite feasibility. It's just that the adhoc on-video tests there seem to provide a false hook into the story, like all these types of on the street interviews.
You cant make a circuit with one wire? People arent being caught, the rules are basic physics, ohms law is taught to 14 year olds in high schools. We have Mechanical Engineer unable to fix a flashlight coming out of MIT.
You can, but it would be pretty short.
I wouldn’t expect a very smart history major to be much better at this task than the average person.
In china, those children can give their parents smartphones and other electronics :)