I remember watching a documentary on a TV many years ago that covered the last hundred years and its theme song was “As Time Goes By”…
anyway, i was probably about 15 years old and one piece of footage from that program has never left me.
It was illustrating what happened when the TV became central to the family in the late 1940’s and how it superseded the piano as family centre piece. Having a a TV was keeping up with the Joneses.There was footage of masses of pianos being mercilessly thrown off balconies, hundreds of them were destroyed, many wounded beyond repair. Strings and shards of wood crunched asunder, the last groans of sound uttered and then silent as they met with cobbled stones of obsolescence… to be replaced by Televisions.
The footage was in slow motion, just like a baby born in a birthing pool and held underwater before taking its first gasp of air.
In that moment, 401 K’s stood to be lost, a wild west lawless technology was loosed upon the world.