Distance between Two Points – Part 1: Introduction
News sure travels fast today. Just the other day I was sitting in my home in Southern California watching live streaming video of oil gushing from a pipe 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana and 8,000 feet beneath the Gulf Mexico. A few months ago, I wasted three hours watching live coverage on C-SPAN of the House of Representatives as they got around to voting on the historic Health care bill. Just the other night one of my local news stations informed me that they were standing by live to show us Lindsay Lohan as she was released from jail – I decided that I would pass on that. There is a limit to how much I really need to know about what is going in the world.
Today it seems we get our news (information regarding a current event) almost as it happens. In some cases many of us have witnessed monumental events as they happened such as Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald on live on television in the Dallas Police garage in 1963 or Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon in July of 1969. Yet it hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when there wasn’t an internet, any television, any radio, any telephone or telegraph.
The internet, invented in the early 1970′s, did not come into wide-spread use until the 1990′s. The television, invented in the late 1920′s, did not start appearing in American homes until the late 1940′s. Radio was invented in the 1890′s, but the commercialization of radio didn’t come about until after World War I. Bell invented the telephone in 1876 and it was in limited use by the 1890′s, but the first transcontinental telephone call was not made until 1915 and the first customer-connected long-distance telephone call wasn’t made until 1951. The telegraph invented in 1837 and made commercially viable just before the start of the Civil War in 1861 revolutionized the way humans exchanged information. The first commercially successful transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in 1866.
Consider how long it took for news to travel in the days before the invention of telegraph. In 1817 the average lead time for public information from New York City to Savannah, Georgia was ten days. From New York to the upcountry of South Carolina was about twenty days and from New York to New Orleans the time was one month. By 1841, due to improvements in transportation and the efficiency of the postal service, the time for news to travel from New York City to the upcountry of South Carolina was shorten to thirteen days, from New York to New Orleans to ten days, and from New York to central Ohio about seven days. In 1820 the US Postal Service employed more people than the peacetime armed forces and more than all the rest of the civilian bureaucracy put together. Between 1815 and 1830 the number of post offices grew from 3000 to 8000. (Source: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) by Daniel Walker Howe (2009)).
Then, just as now, in many cases it didn’t matter how long it took for news to make it from one place to the other. I mean, who really cares when Lindsay Lohan gets out of jail? But in some cases a lengthy delay in getting the word out did make a big difference and may have changed the course of history.
The next three articles will discuss communications and transportation in the 19th century from the perspective of my family history.
(This has been part 1 of a 4 part series regarding communications and transportation in the 19th century)
