Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold

Incorporating seventy-five vintage photographs and illustrations, as well as excerpts from original instruction manuals, an intriguing study of the history of technology in America explores the evolution and influence of such technological marvels as the telegraph, taypewriter, radio, train, plane, fax, and Internet on American culture. 12,500 first printing.

TRANSPORTATION

FOR SOME, AS FOR THOMAS COLE, whose painting River in the Catskills (1843) is the frontispiece to Part 1, new technology was intrusive. A naturalist and poet as well as a painter, Cole abhorred even the buzz of sawmills and the smell of tanneries in his beloved Catskill Mountains. How much worse the ruination when the Canajoharie and Catskill Rail Road rumbled into his wilderness in the mid-1830s. Cole pressed for a public debate: "Are railroads and canals favorable or unfavorable to the morality and happiness of . . . the United States?" When the debate was put to the tip of his brush, however, Cole subtly allowed the inevitability of progress. His painting, showing the Catskills in all their splendor, admits the railroad as a wisp of smoke (center left) that divulges a train making its way across a trestle.

That Cole's hostility was tempered by a sense of inevitability is apparent from a curious sidelight. River in the Catskills was painted in 1843. In March 1840 the Canajoharie and Catskill suffered a devastating accident: A trestle over the Catskill Creek gave way, sending a train hurtling into the river. The line's only passenger cars were destroyed and its one locomotive damaged; the mishap effectively put the railroad out of business. Cole might have painted a scene of mangled cars lying in the Catskill Creek and called that his River in the Catskills. Instead, this first great American landscape painter-in this first representation of the railroad in American art-allowed his hallowed landscape to illustrate a point: What no clock can turn back ought to be accepted with equanimity.

We generally find an overwhelmingly positive reaction to new technology. As the British novelist Anthony Trollope wrote in 1862 after visiting America, "The great glory of the Americans is in their wondrous contrivances." But it has never been a one-way street. Transportation, in particular, has often imposed heavy hardship through dislodgment and a disquieting presence. Railroads, in the early days, were notorious for running roughshod in laying out routes. Highways, airport runways, even aircraft approach routes have all dislocated in various ways. The noise factor in modern transportation is vastly beyond the buzz that Cole dreaded.

Yet whatever the negatives, Americans have gloried in their wondrous devices from the start. Railroads provided the first real savor of speed: "We flew on the wings of the wind," exulted a passenger on the first run of the first scheduled railroad train in America, in 1830.

The automobile combined speed with another American trait-a zest for personal mobility. When it came to taking to the air, Americans were more cautious. Even in 1927, according to a major magazine of the day, it was thought to be a case of "Air-Shy America . . . The United States, except for its flyers, is air-shy. It quickly made an industry of the movies and the automobile; but of the airplane it made only a stunt performer, never considering it seriously as a vehicle for the civilian." That would change with the coming of scheduled airline travel. As in that valley in the Catskills, the clock turns only clockwise.

ANNIHILATING TIME AND SPACE
THE RAILROADS

We flew on the wings of the wind at the varied speed of fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, annihilating time and space.
--Charleston Courier, December 29, 1830

IN ALL THE AGES OF HUMAN HISTORY, from the confines of the cave dweller to the post-Napoleonic world of steam power, the general pace of travel had never progressed much beyond what could be done with one's own two feet. Most people had to settle for walking, usually never far from home.

At more than 15 miles an hour, the first run of the first scheduled railroad train in America, on Christmas Day, 1830, seemed as fast as the wind to a passenger who told all about it in the Charleston Courier. That kind of travel, at a speed the equivalent of a brisk breeze, was faster than humankind was used to moving. For most people in 1830, a walking pace of 2 to 3 miles an hour was as fast as the scenery ever went by.

Steamboats plying the Hudson River between New York and Albany could traverse the 150 or so miles in roughly ten hours in the early 1830s. That was 15 miles an hour, but only a relative few could afford that kind of travel or even lived in proximity to steamboats. Otherwise travel on water was considerably slower: by canal boat, anywhere from 11*2 to 5 miles per hour; and interruptions in service-ice in winter, floods or drought in summer-were a constant problem. Sailing packets depended on the wind. At the turn of the nineteenth century, those on the Hudson River took anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on the wind and the direction of travel, to get from New York to Albany.

The fastest land travel, before the age of railroads, was the stagecoach, which on a good road averaged perhaps 6 to 8 miles an hour. On that critical route between New York and Philadelphia, sharp competition forced maximum effort by drivers and horses, upping average speed to roughly 11 miles an hour, but that was exceptionally fast travel over land.

No wonder travelers were so awed by what the railroad accomplished. The redoubtable Davy Crockett, a few years later, had his own way of reckoning it: "I can only judge of the speed by putting my head out to spit, which I did, and overtook it so quick, that it hit me smack in the face." So great became an obsession with speed that it tended to distort reality. When a Baltimore and Ohio train was late leaving Cumberland, Maryland, in 1855, it tried to make up the time, its engine darting with "rocket-like impetuosity." "In vain," said passenger Charles Richard Weld, "was the conductor urged to slacken the excessive speed." There was a "terrific crash . . . heavings and collisions, terminating in deathlike silence." Whereupon, said Weld, survivors, instead of rebuking the conductor, praised him for his noble attempt to arrive on time.

But speed was more than physical sensation. It was also a redefinition of time and space. "To see more clearly the curtailing influence of these [rail]roads on space and time," said Niles' Register in 1831, projecting rail travel a few years hence, "let us suppose that at less speed by a third than in this early stage of locomotive experiment, has already been safely accomplished, a passenger [in Philadelphia] was to set out on a rail road toward the west. [He would] reach Lancaster in 2 hours, Pittsburg in 10 hours, New Orleans in less than 2 days, and return to Philadelphia within a week."

In the context of travel times in 1831, that was redefining time and space. A few years later, Niles' declared that "Science has conquered space. . . . The people of places 1,000 miles apart, are nearer neighbors. . . . As we have said before, distance will not be measured by miles, but by hours and minutes. 'It is ten hours to such a place, or 49 minutes to another.' "

"Neighbors," though a thousand miles apart? Distance measured not in miles but in minutes? These were expectations of a new order-one that seemed to some even to challenge the proportions of the technological revolution that was the coming of steam power in the eighteenth century. As the telegraph would do a decade later in eliminating time, so also were the railroads seen to be annihilating space. In this redefining of time and space, predicted Niles' Register in 1831, "rail roads, we think, associated with steam power, are about to accomplish a much greater revolution in the future affairs of men and nations, than steam, itself, has yet about in the present condition of things."

Such far-reaching effect was only barely sensed in the original...