Twentieth Century
By 1900 the Manchester city region was the 9th most populous in the world. In the early 20th century Manchester's economy diversified into engineering chemical and electrical industries. The stimulus of the Ship Canal saw the establishment of Trafford Park, the world's first industrial park, in 1910 and the arrival of the Ford Motor Company and Westinghouse Electric Corporation from the USA. The influence is still visible in "Westinghouse Road" and a grid layout of numbered streets and avenues.
In 1931 the population of Manchester reached an all-time peak of 766,311. However the period from the 1930s onwards saw continuous decline in population. During this period, textile manufacture, Manchester's traditional staple industry went into steep decline, largely due to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and foreign competition.
Signicant changes in this period were the move of the Manchester Royal Infirmary from Piccadilly in 1908 and the building of a new Public Library and Town Hall extension in the 1930s.
Read more about this topic: History Of Manchester
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“... the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The descendants of Holy Roman Empire monarchies became feeble-minded in the twentieth century, and after World War I had been done in by the democracies; some were kept on to entertain the tourists, like the one they have in England.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)