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At the beginning of the twentieth century, change appeared every-
where. In civilized cultures throughout the world, traditional beliefs
were starting to be overshadowed by emerging new ideas. A flood
of groundbreaking innovations and inventions redefined the archi-
tecture and built environment and forever transformed the now-
industrialized modern world.
In the 1870s, the invention of electricity and the incandescent
lightbulb by Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) ultimately enhanced
the way in which people interacted with one another and with the
built environments they lived in. Communication was also dramati-
cally altered in the late nineteenth century by the introduction
of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) and his
assistant, ...