The Second Industrial Revolution 755

More Europeans could now travel for leisure than ever before. Middle­
class vacations became more common. The travel business boomed. Health

spas and resorts, which had developed since the mid-1800s, became even
more popular in Western Europe. Spas claimed that their thermal waters
offered healing and sustaining properties that facilitated the circulation of
blood, attacked gout—the encumbering malady of people who were too well
fed—or in some other way restored to equilibrium the human body victim­
ized by modern life.
Mediterranean, North Sea, and English Channel resorts offered casinos
and beachfront promenades. English coastal towns like Brighton and Black­
pool attracted visitors oblivious to the rain. The tourist pier and arcade took
shape. English nobles, who could afford to flee the British winter, “discov­
ered” Nice. Upper-class Italians began to frequent their own Riviera, Bel­
gians the port of Ostend, and Germans the Baltic resorts. Vacationers from
many countries discovered the Alps and sent the first postcards back to envi­
ous friends. Partially spurred on by tourism, photography emerged as a major
visual art. The relatively light Kodak camera appeared in 1888. Bretons
began to refer to French-speaking tourists as “Kodakers.”
A revolution in communications also slowly transformed life. The tele­
graph had already increased the availability of news from around the
world, with the help of press agencies like Havas, the Associated Press,
and Reuters. The telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell (1847­
1922) in 1876, reached private homes. Germans made 8 million telephone
calls in 1883, 700 million in 1900. Fifteen years after Thomas Edison
invented the gramophone in 1876, a number of virtuosos had made their
first scratchy recordings. The Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937)
pioneered the first wireless
voice communication in the

1890s; by 1913, weekly con­

certs could be heard on the

radio in Brussels. Silent

motion pictures, first shown

in 1895, became an imme­

diate hit, sometimes accom­

panied by a piano. Early

viewers watched brief

scenes of modern life, such

as a train beginning to move.

Longer films with plots and

action followed. The Austro­

Hungarian army began to

experiment with motion pic­

tures, using cameras to

study the flight of artillery

shells. Women at work at a telephone switchboard.