After reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth, I was interested to see more of what it felt like to be living during the period of rapid modernization that happened during the early 1900s. In doing so, I stumbled upon a fascinating film from 1939 of a fictional family visiting the real-life 1939 World's Fair in New York, which gives you a feel for what it might have been like to see this shining but achievable dream of modernity as it was presented at the time.
Some caveats: The film is basically an hour long ad for Westinghouse, and a fairly cheesy one at that, with mediocre scripting and acting. There's also a very clear "private enterprise good, socialism bad" narrative repeated over and over via the movie, with these perspectives presented by two competing suitors for a young woman's love at the Fair. Given the age of the film, it also has more than a handful of cringey sexist and racist moments.
All that said, it was exciting to see how so many of the inventions that underlie the modern world were presented at the fair. Most of the modern household appliances (refrigerators, dishwashers, A/C, etc) were out, but were not owned by most households yet. The Fair presents the modern house in its entirety as an aspirational thing that's just within reach. The movie has a grandmother character who is used as a vehicle to contrast this modern world with just how much harder things were for her when she was young. You can tell how proud the company and filmmakers were of the radical transformation that had happened over the previous 40 years. The message was very much "cheer up, the Great Depression is ending, industrial automation is creating millions of jobs, and that's going to give people the money they need to buy all these modern time-saving appliances to eliminate household drudgery".
Some other things of note: The film also shows demos of early industrial automation and safety equipment, as well as oscilloscopes, analog feedback systems, and other tools of the analog era. The Fair also had its share of ridiculous but still impressive demos, including a "talking robot" with pre-recorded scripted speech and animatronics. Finally, it's wonderful to see the inspiring art-deco murals and other art and visual design presentations from the era.