three hundred years in thirty

In Queen Victoria's long life, Mark Twain observes in the opening paragraph on page 979, the world had "moved farther ahead" than in any comparable period in England's history. This is certainly true of the current generation as well. As in Victoria's reign, there have been many shifts in world power over the past sixty to eighty years. The shape of world maps are fluid, shifting borders are more the rule than the exception. However, even with all of this flux in international politics, we are currently experiencing a time of change in the "mind and habits" of the average American, where technology and medicine have created new possibilities, and I could not help being caught up in the idea of not being able to recognise my own grandparents, as mentioned at the bottom of 979.
My grandmother was born in 1938 in Cherokee, NC. Her family had no electricity and water came from a hand-pumped well. they had a horse and a hand-made cart that my great grandmother, a widow, delivered milk, eggs, and vegetables to better-off neighbors on while my grandmother cut wood and cooked for her two younger brothers.
While my great-grandmother has passed on, my grandmother, who is now in her early seventies, is a small business owner who runs her own restaurant in Kingsport, TN. She is in the bloom of health thanks to medical improvements which allowed her to undergo microscopic surgery on a shoulder injury caused by years of heavy physical work that would have been crippling to a generation before and testing and constant monitoring of blood pressure and cholesterol. She is inseparable from her cell phone, which she uses to keep up with family that was too far away to hear from more than once a year or so in her youth, and she uses a laptop connected to her home computer to keep her profit and overhead on track. On a good day she runs out of some food stuff and can make a quick car trip to Sam's club and pick up safe, hygienically sound ingredients until her delivery arrives by truck. She keeps up with the latest advances in restaurant safety at special classes.
This is change on the order of what was seen in Victoria's reign. Railways then equal private vehicle ownership now. Universal compulsory education has its like in the availability of community colleges and vocational-tech schools funded to be available to the children of even the poverty stricken, or even the parents of those families. The telegraph, widely available printing press, and intercontinental cable can be likened to the Internet, cellular service, and cable news television. We are truly living "the life of three hundred years in thirty."