Great moments of the 20th century were preserved on film for the future (boomer generation takes a closer look at the past century and the events that, for the first time, were recorded on film and preserved in history)
Our passing century is unique in history as the only one to have been recorded on film and video. Since the early 1900s, amateur photographers and newsreel cameras have preserved its anthology.
Preserved on film and video, in the motion picture and TV archives, are the century's greatest triumphs and disasters. Newsreel cameras have filmed "The Innocent Oughts," "The Roaring '20s," "The Swinging '30s" and so on, down through the decades. Recorded on grainy film in 1906 are dramatic scenes from San Francisco's great 8.3 quake and ensuing fire; in 1912, amateur filmmakers aboard the Titanic recorded the luxury liner's ill-fated maiden voyage; in 1927, thousands of fans in Yankee Stadium saw Babe Ruth smash his 60th homer. The record was preserved on thready celluloid film.
Seventy-one years later, Mark McGwire became the new home-run king, and through a sophisticated camera lens millions of TV viewers were privy to the event, as well as to each muscle twitch and bead of sweat to grace McGwire's brow. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh climbed into the cockpit of his prop-plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, and set out on his solo flight over the Atlantic."
A handful of reporters and a reel-to-reel film camera were there to preserve the historical moment. Forty-two years later, a billion viewers worldwide watched as astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. By 1976, the supersonic Concorde was flying at speeds and heights never before imagined. A decade later, powerful telescopic lenses televised close-up the failed dream of the Challenger space shuttle. Recorded in 1937 was the mysterious crash of Germany's luxury airship, the Hindenburg, as it came in for mooring at Lake Hurst, N.J. Without warning, the great hydrogen-filled zeppelin burst into flames and plummeted to the ground, taking a total of 37 lives.
Radio commentator Herb Morrison's chilling eyewitness account of the tragedy created an indelible memory for his listening audience. The crash remains a mystery. During World War II, radio reports from wartime correspondents like Edward R. Murrow kept America briefed from the battlefield on a war that seemed worlds away.
Later, with the advent of television, radio listeners became viewers. Television brought us the world in a way newspapers and radio never could. The bedrock of TV viewing was the family sitcom. It was the 1950s "Do it for the kids" decade. Howdy-Doody, The Mickey Mouse Club, and Davy Crockett reflected their influence du jour. Family sitcoms like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show created the American family image.
The home movie camera came along, and Americans began recording family birthdays and vacations on blurry, out-of-focus 8 mm film rolls. The assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy sent a stunned and apprehensive America to TV's venerable newscaster Walter Cronkite, who reassured us with his trusted commentary.
In 1968 Cronkite reported from Vietnam and for the first time denounced the war... and a disenchanted nation began to wonder. The 1970s brought a worldwide flurry of airline hijackings and terrorist attacks, thus prompting experts on the subject to declare that any woman unmarried by age 40 had a greater chance of being shot by a terrorist than she had of finding Mr. Right! A nation of mature single women began to worry.
TV viewers became world watchers. Some of the things we were watching: Nixon's trip to China, the Watergate scandal and Nixon's subsequent resignation. In 1972, the Olympic Games in Munich drew world attention as Palestinian gunmen invaded the compound, killing two men and taking nine hostages. We saw a shaken John McKay announce to the world that all the hostages were lost in a failed attempt to free them.
At the close of the decade, terrorists seized the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, taking Americans captive. After 18 long months of negotiations, the 52 hostages were released. The 1980s media became a technical mix of tabloid television and world news. The fractured TV family was primetime, and the only functional families were seen in re-runs. If what they say is true, that TV mirrors us more than it molds us, Roseanne, Married with Children and The Simpsons represented American family life at its worst.
In 1981, worldwide media coverage took us to St. Paul's Cathedral to attend England's storybook wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. The following decade, in 1997, a saddened world returned via TV satellite to London's Westminster Abbey to say farewell to the "People's Princess."
Some memorable images of the past decade: CNN brought us the Gulf War in 1991, like no other war before it. With live color commentary from Baghdad we watched as SCUD missiles descended on the city; through the camera's eye we saw the remains of the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1994, minutes after a terrorist bomb reduced it to rubble, 167 lives lost; we saw the strange 35-mile-an-hour pursuit of O.J. Simpson in a white Bronco, and later his drawn-out murder trial (TV now had two dysfunctional Simpson families, O.J.'s and Bart's.)
The Internet published the salacious Starr report. TV viewers watched an independent counsel interrogate President Clinton, and a nation heard more than it wanted to know of his sexual encounters; we saw U.S. missiles raining down again on Iraq and saw the impeachment hearings on President Clinton. But there were inspiring moments, too: John Glenn re-emerged to bravely orbit the world again and made us seek in ourselves what we admired in him; the graciousness of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they battled for baseball's home-run record.
Their dignity and accomplishments stimulated a love for the national game and reunited a cynical nation suffering from Monicagate. We've come a long way since the turn of the century when Thomas A. Edison recorded sound and toyed with the invention of motion pictures, and George Eastman created the Kodak camera that allowed us to preserve history at a glance.
Our future lies now in the new millennium and in the hands of other, great scientists and technical wizards who will create their own ideas, ideologies and contrivances that will record and log the 21st century that awaits us.
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