Changing Contours of Life 1143in droves. North American, Asian, and African destinations became more
common for Europeans.
The French and British governments collaborated on the development of
the supersonic Concorde, which, in the late 1970s, began to fly a small
number of extremely wealthy passengers from Paris and London to New
York and Washington, D.C., in three hours and fifteen minutes, less than
half the time of a regular jet. However, an aging fleet, a disastrous crash near
a Paris airport, and years of financial losses ended supersonic travel by Con
corde in 2003. Far more successful, the first high-speed trains (the TGVs)
began service in France in 1981. They carry passengers in comfort at speeds
well over 170 miles per hour. Other countries, too, developed fast trains. In
1994, the “Chunnel” opened, a thirty-mile tunnel linking France and Great
Britain by trains running under the English Channel, putting London little
more than two hours away from Paris and Brussels.
Beginning in the 1960s, millions of Europeans began to take to the road,
above all in July and August, many heading toward the sunny beaches of
southern Europe. Paid vacations became an expected part of the “good life.”
Tourism became essential to the economies of France, Spain, Italy, Portugal,
and Greece.
American consumerism and popular culture found increasing favor in Eu
ropean societies. Supermarkets began to put many small grocery stores out
of business. American words and terms crept into European languages. Ten
nis shoes and tee-shirts swept Europe, and so did American television shows.
By the late 1970s, McDonalds had begun to dot European capitals and
gradually smaller cities as well. In the 1980s, EuroDisney (now called
Disneyland-Paris), opened its doors outside of Paris. One French theatrical
director called it “a cultural Chernobyl” (referring to the nuclear accident in
Ukraine in 1986). In the first decade of the new century, Starbucks cafes
began to arrive in Europe in increasing numbers.
Communications also underwent an amazing revolution in Europe as
elsewhere. Household telephones became more common in the 1960s in
most of Western Europe. Forty years later, cell phones had taken over,
increasingly putting telephone booths out of business. (Reacting to the
annoyance of people shouting into portable phones on trains and street cor
ners and in restaurants, or while driving, one wag noted that he had had
great faith in humanity until the arrival of the cell phone.) The cost of
transatlantic phone calls fell rapidly with the advent of optical fiber in the
1980s. Then in the 1990s the computer revolution and the Internet put a
world of information at the fingertips of Europeans, as well as people almost
everywhere.
Television helped shape a mass consumer culture, catapulting entertain
ers to fame and making household names of politicians who could be heard
instead of simply imagined. The first television sets had been viewed at the
World’s Fair in New York City in 1939. By the late 1960s, a majority of West
ern European households had a television, and by the mid-1970s, relatively