A Transportation Revolution

I have just finished reading Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Meriwether Lewis in Undaunted Courage.  This is a fascinating work primarily concerned with the Lewis and Clark expedition of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803-1806.  I have marked certain sections of the book and may share more in a couple of coming posts. 

Ambrose’s observations about the state of movement in 1800 are very interesting.

“In addition, it seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent. The distances were just too great. A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing ever had moved any faster, and, as far as Jefferson’s contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would” (52).

In a footnote, he observes that there are exceptions (a bullet, light, sound), but it was a different world when nothing moved faster than a horse!

A couple of pages later, he described how radically the situation had changed only sixty years later.

“Describing the mind-set of the time, [Henry] Adams wrote, ‘Experience forced on men’s minds the conviction that what had ever been must ever be. ‘ But only sixty years later, when Abraham Lincoln took the Oath of Office as the sixteenth president of the United States, Americans could move bulky items in greater quantity farther in an hour than Americans of 1801 could do in a day, whether by land (twenty-five miles per hour on railroads) or water (ten miles an hour upstream on a steamboat). This great leap forward in transportation—a factor of twenty or more—in so short a space of time must be reckoned as the greatest and most unexpected revolution of all—except for another technological revolution, the transmitting of information. In Jefferson’s day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C. In Lincoln’s, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously” (54).

I wonder if we appreciate too little just how much the world has changed so very quickly.  Of course today one can stand nearly anywhere on the planet and talk instantly with someone anywhere else.  Maybe even a video chat!