Charting America and Heading West
Good morning. It’s February 28, the date, back in 1827, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad became the first railway chartered in this country. The idea of the B & O ownership was to compete with New York for western trade – at a time “the West” meant the Ohio Valley.
From that modest ambition grew an industry that settled a continent.
It’s easy to forget these days, especially if you’ve recently tried to use wifi on Amtrak, but the advent of the railroad was perhaps the greatest 19th century technological success story.
Put in your water, shovel in your coal,
Put cha head out the window and watch the drivers roll
I'll run her 'til she leaves the rail
For I'm eight hours late with the western mail.
That song, “Casey Jones,” was included by the Library of Congress on an album called “California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties.” But there was a lot more than mail being carried on those trains. And the most valuable cargo was people.
The patent for a steam engine was granted in 1815, a year after a British engineer built a steam locomotive that hauled eight railroad cars up a grade at 4 miles per hour. But no infrastructure existed to support the invention, and more than a decade later the United States still had only 23 miles of railroad tracks.
But a couple of years later, America had 46 miles of track, and a couple of years after that, 92 miles - and so on. In one decade the miles of rail lines doubled nearly seven times, so that by 1840 the country boasted 2,800 miles of track. And, as author Joel Garreau notes in “Radical Evolution,” between 1840 and 1910 the amount of railroad track doubled 14 ½ times.
It would be hard to overstate the effect this had on the country.
“The railroads changed whatever they touched,” says Garreau, a journalist, demographer, futurist, and all-around smart person. “It changed cities; it changed families; it changed businesses; it changed this country. A struggling, backward, rural civilization mostly hugging the East Coast was converted into a continent-spanning, world-challenging, urban behemoth."
Ultimately, the doublings of the building of new tracks stopped. Railroads were supplemented by other technologies, including automobiles, tractor trailers, and airplanes. But the law of technological doublings, known variously as Moore’s law or The Curve, continues with the latest frontier not being 30-ton “iron horses,” but tiny computing and communications devices you can hold in your hands.
The implication of this phenomenon is that if the government can get its fiscal house in order and the private economy can shake off its lethargy, a huge pent-up demand for even newer technological applications is waiting in the wings, and will bring new miracles to the marketplace, once again altering Americans’ everyday life, if not our politics.
