Did My Grandparents' Brains Ever Explode?

I live in a historic neighborhood, about three blocks from where my paternal grandparents set up housekeeping in the very early years of the twentieth century, certainly before the 1920s and quite likely before WWI, which my grandfather did not participate in. I sometimes try to imagine what life was like during that period. We like to think of today as the epitome of rapid progress, but I think it's nothing next to what they experienced. Today, semiconductor technology has made only tiny incremental advances since the breakthroughs of the transistor and the integrated circuit back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But consider what my grandparents lived through -

The telephone. During the period before my father's birth (1928), the telephone went from being an oddity in hotels and banks to everyday objects in homes.

The car. When they moved to our town, my grandparents could have seen horses still pulling wagonloads of coal and ice around town. By the time my father was born, horses had vanished from the streets, and internal combustion engines ruled.

Central heating. Most of the homes around here still have coal scuttles or blocked-off holes where the scuttles were. By the 1940s, coal was a dead business, supplanted by gas heat in a central furnace.

Radio. By 1930, most of the homes hereabouts were within hearing distance of a radio, and by the late 1930s every home had at least one.

Television. They appeared in abundance in the 1950s. My grandparents were only just thinking about their retirements.

Air conditioning. They never had any. Neither did most of the homes until recently, perhaps the 1970s. Many still don't. But they saw it arrive in homes.

Aircraft. They lived from the beginning of aviation until the Jet Age. Although neither ever traveled on a jet, they could watch the planes pass overhead.

Their world both shrank and expanded at an astonishing pace. When they moved here, most transportation was horse (expensive), on foot (limited), or by trolley (good for long distances). Most people lived near their jobs and walked to work. Communication was by word of mouth, or, rarely and expensively, by telegram. Perhaps by newspaper for larger news. By the time they died, they could have phoned any place in the world, heard war news from Europe, watched live broadcasts from Africa, flown to Greenland. My grandfather's jobs changed accordingly. The plant where he worked started out making farm implements and ended up making trucks. The coal and ice supply where he worked part-time shut down finally, when demand shriveled away to nothing.

Yet they never seemed to be overawed by what happened around them. Today we're terribly self-conscious about our new things, but they seemed to take them in stride. When they answered the phone, they never put the receiver down reverently. The refrigerator, gas stove, and furnace were just ordinary devices by the time I knew them in the 1960s and 1970s. I suspect my grandmother, had I asked, would have expressed joy that she no longer had to kindle a coal fire first thing in the morning, but she never brought up the subject. They saw revolutions over and over again, yet never seemed stunned by any of it. Perhaps it was a lack of self-awareness, but it may also have been simple acceptance of it all, much as they seemed to accept all the deaths in the family (two out of four children dead in early adulthood) and the antics of the grandchildren. Come what may, they did their best without any public notices about it. Maybe in their world, revolutions didn't need to be understood, just tolerated, like everything else.