Scientific and technological advances do not only transform human affairs on a grand scale, by destroying old orders and creating new ones. These areas of endeavor also contribute to great changes at the personal level. Human beings have a mixture of individual and collective behaviors, and all too often we pay attention only to the life of the mass and not that of the individual.

Humanizing history usually entails focusing on a single individual or a small collection of them, such as a family. In an effort to capture the wrenching transformations of the twentieth century, I will explore the life of an individual whom I know well, namely my own grandmother, Sara Savitz. She is not a person of any widespread fame, which is why she is important.

Sara Weinstein was born in 1908 in New York, the first American-born child to a family of Lithuanian Jews. After her mother died of pneumonia, four-year-old Sara was sent to live with relatives in Philadelphia. She began to learn English when she went to school in 1914. Sara married Percy Savitz, a pharmacist, in 1930; she managed to raise two children during the Depression, despite a foreclosure on her husband's store. The Holocaust wiped out her relatives who had stayed behind in Europe. With three children now--my father, Barry, was the youngest--she helped Percy run his West Philadelphia pharmacy in the postwar years, while also witnessing the birth of an independent state of Israel. The turbulent 1960s brought troubles to the store in the form of robberies and threats. Sara and Percy left the store and moved to Northeast Philadelphia in 1972, the year of my birth. Percy passed away eight years later, but Sara is still going strong in 1996.

The most dramatic difference between the time of Sara's youth and the present one is the pace of change itself. During the Victorian era immediately preceding Sara's birth, change was relatively gradual. A major shift in world power might occur once a century; dramatic technological innovations might occur every decade or two. Though industrialization and urbanization had already altered society immensely, there was a widespread feeling that only a modicum of further change would follow the Industrial Revolution. Nothing in the experience of those who raised or educated Sara would help that generation to prepare Sara's for the rapid changes of the twentieth century.

Sara's story captures the imagination most when we bring together elements chronologically distant from one another, but still within the lifetime of a single (and not unusually old) individual. She grew up without a telephone, but sees her grandchildren communicate by electronic mail. She used an outhouse as a child, but watched people walk on the moon in her middle age. She has gone from seeing running water installed in the home to microwave ovens and VCRs. Her birth preceded Marconi's invention of the radio; interactive and high-definition television will soon appear in her old age. She has also witnessed great advances in human self- destruction, from gas warfare to "smart weapons." She has been healed with medical techniques that were wholly unknown at the time of her birth. Though she scarcely knew her parents, she has played with her great-grandchildren.

In describing the pace of political change in this century, I will once again select a few examples. Sara refers not to "Veterans' Day" but to "Armistice Day"--for it was precisely that for World War I, a war which she remembers. When Sara was six, the name of St. Petersburg was Russified into Petrograd; it was soon transformed into the Soviet Leningrad, famous for withstanding a Nazi siege. Towards the end of Sara's life--after nearly half a century of Cold War--the city became St. Petersburg once more. In Sara's lifetime, she saw Nazism, as Communism would later be, buried--though not before each had sent tens of millions of innocents to their graves.

To be sure, science and technology have played only one part in the dramatic transformation of Sara's life. But the rapid scientific and technological advances of our time have transformed the ideological, economic, social, and other aspects of society so greatly that it is inconceivable to speak meaningfully of the twentieth century without examining how scientific and technological advances have shaped it. Sara has seen daily life become more unpleasant in some respects over the course of her lifetime. Families are less close-knit than they once were, violent crimes are more frequent, and there is more uncertainty about the future. But the vast majority of people on Earth live better than they ever have, being able to afford decent food, houses, water supplies, and clothing.

More dramatic than society's advance is the increase in potential for further growth. The twentieth century has been the most innovative and scientifically sophisticated era in human history; the vast majority of the world's scientists who have ever lived are alive today. The total quantity of written material doubles every few years; the percentage of people worldwide who are literate has skyrocketed. In these fin-de-siecle days, it is customary to look back on the figures who shaped this century. Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao--to name just a few mid-century leaders--all played pivotal roles. But to me, this century will always belong to Sara Savitz, whose life encapsulates it. Her 88 years (in 1996) have borne witness from inkwells to personal computers, from the formation of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to their collapse, from a tottering Imperial Chinese dynasty to a tottering People's Republic. And the pace of change has grown more rapid with each passing decade.

What wonders, then, may Sara's descendants live to see?

Postscript: Sara Savitz passed away peacefully in January 1997.