As I mentioned in chapter 1, the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century have come to be described by many as the second Industrial Revolution, the transformation in Western Europe and America of the relatively small-scale industrialism of entrepreneurial or industrial capitalism to large-scale finance capitalism. This period created an enormous increase in consumable wealth — personal income among Parisian workers, for instance, increased about 65 percent in the two generations after the mid-nineteenth century, advertising revenues in the United States during the same period increased tenfold (Birkin 1988: 118, 120), and there was an explosion of technologically advanced consumer goods such as bicycles, automobiles, telephones, domestic electric lighting, and the like (Kern 1983; see also Tipton and Albrich 1987) in a period that, a generation ago, Carleton Hayes called “the climax of the Enlightenment” (1941: 328). “By 1900,” Oron Hale notes, “Europe was the center of a booming world economy”; it was experiencing one of those discontinuous leaps forward in technology and invention which had marked the industrial progress since the mid-eighteenth century.