This class we focused on the technological advances of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, and how they affected the perception of man’s place in time and space. There were more technological advances in the West during that time than in any other period of history before or since, so much so that people were afraid of the ‘annihilation of time and space’ through new inventions such as the telegraph and railroad. People could now communicate with technology over vast distances, and no longer were bound by the confines of horses, they could travel incredible distances in just one day. Where you lived no longer constrained you. This was the beginning of the change in man’s perception of the world, distance was becoming irrelevant, and with the first photograph in 1834, time was also changed. Photographs were different from portraits and anything else that had ever come before it; with a photograph the exact moment in time that is was taken was forever preserved, like a message from the past and that scared people. People’s sense of Time was also displaced through inventions such as the electric light and the standardization of American time, when before everyone had gone by the sun and every town had their own variation of when the day started, this was no longer feasible when people began to be able to travel longer distances in a shorter amount of time. This also worried people, because since they told time by their specific place in relation to the sun they were following the “natural” order of things, or “God’s” order, and by Man declaring their own time zones and standardization they were disrupting that order and placing themselves above God. it’s odd to think about how so many of the technologies and viewpoints we take advantage of today were so mindblowing less than 200 years ago. While I knew that the inventions themselves were revolutionary and scared some of the population, I had never thought of how they could affect people’s views of the world and their own place in it.