14.3: Transportation and Communication

Although the Industrial Revolution began with mining and textiles, the most dramatic effect was in transportation. In 1820, the first experimental railroad was put in use, followed by the first passenger railroad (1830) traveling between the industrial cities of Manchester and Liverpool in northern England. By the middle of the century, some trains could go 50 MPH! Between 1830-1850, approximately 6,500 miles of rail were built in Britain. Railroad expansion soon followed suit on the continent. The construction of railroads became a massive industry unto itself, fueling both profitable investment and the occasional disastrous financial collapse.

Above and beyond their economic impact, railroads had a myriad of social and cultural effects. The British developed the system of time zones, based on Greenwich (part of London) Mean Time as the “default,” because the railroads had to be coordinated to time departures and arrivals. Now a whole country, and soon a whole continent, had a precise shared sense of timing.

Likewise, in 1830, the telegraph was invented and used initially to warn train stations when multiple trains were on the track. Telegraphs allowed almost instant communication over huge distances, sending a series of electrical impulses over a wire as "long" and "short" signals. The inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse, invented a code based off on those signals that could be translated into letters and, as a result, be used to send messages. Morse Code enabled the first modern mass communications device, vastly increasing the speed by which information could be shared and disseminated.

Simultaneously, steamships were transforming long-distance commerce. Sailing in 1816, the first one went about twice as fast as the fastest sailing ship could. Soon, it became cheaper to transport basic goods via steamship than it was to use locally-produced ones. Thus, this improvement had greatly impacted culture and forestry, among other industries. Shipping grain from the United States or Russia across oceans to reach European markets became economically viable. Two steamships raced across England and New York in 1838. Over time sailing vessels became what they are today: archaic novelties.

Two other advances in transportation are often overlooked: paved roads and canals. A Scottish engineer invented a way to cheaply pave roads in the 1830s, and in the 1850s an overland, pan-European postal service was established that relied on “post roads” with stations for changing horses. Thus, well before the invention of cars, road networks were being built in parallel to railroads. Likewise, even though canals had been around since ancient times, there was a major canal-building boom in the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth. Canals linked Manchester to coal fields, the Erie Canal was built in the US to link the great lakes to the eastern seaboard, and even Russia built a canal between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The net effect of these innovations was that travel was vastly cheaper, simpler, and faster than it had ever been in human history. In essence, every place on earth was closer together than ever before.

NOTE: This image displays the cost of transportation in the United States.