Transportation
Web page under construction.
Please return in November 2008 as we launch the fifth year of A World Perspective newsletter.
Transportation
Physical mobility breaks social barriers and leads to democracyAs humanity shed its nomadic beginnings in favor of settled life, the need for transportation to exchange goods from different regions arose. This need was driven by the desire of people with a surplus of a commodity in one community to trade for a different commodity in another community. Such movement of people and surplus goods through the notion of trade is known as transportation. Most of human existence has witnessed people's movements on land dictated by how far and fast one could walk. Animal domestication aided in the transport of goods and the pulling of cargo-laden wheeled wagons.
Such local transport was complemented by long distance transport, mainly by water. People traversed rivers and lakes, navigated along seacoasts, and traveled between islands.
Early Land and Water Transport Systems
Roman and Incan civilizations developed extensive and impressive road systems spanning their empires. These transportation arteries reinforced centralized control by enabling rapid troop movements for the Romans and expedited communications by courier for both the Romans and Incas. In these civilizations, roads were not intended for general use by a mobile citizenry. These corridors were reserved only for the elite and those in service of the government. In fact, Incas discouraged mobility by setting the expectation that one’s birthplace is their future deathbed and by enforcing the rule that only authorities could use the road systems. These early road systems were primarily the transportation and communication tools of Caesar and the Supreme Inca.
Waterways were exploited not only as a source of water, but also as a primary transportation artery. Propulsion was achieved by river currents or with muscle-powered oars on lakes. Simple water craft were suitable for most trips, but as the Mediterranean and Aegean seas were conquered, sails for larger boats were developed to harness the wind and reduce travel time. The ancient Greeks developed a variety of craft for naval battles and for trade and commerce with its emerging colonies. Distance between the islands of the Greek city-states shrank.
Gaining confidence in shipbuilding and navigational skills, and motivated by acquiring riches, open-sea voyages were made by many explorers. The skills of a navigator were in demand and many navigational aids, like the compass, were developed to better pinpoint a ship's location. Wind power was leveraged with the use of triple-masted ship designs to increase speed and reduce the time to reach a far-off destination. The great explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries expanded the European world and resulted in extensive ocean-going trade. Merchant vessels carried gold and silver from California and Latin America, tea and spices from the Orient, and slave labor from Africa.
Up to this point in humanity’s biological and cultural evolution of five hundred thousand years, travel by land proceeded at a pace dictated by one's gait or by how far animals could carry their burden. In water, the pace was determined by water moving at a rate of speed determined by the currents, muscle-powered oars, or the unpredictable power of the wind. The top speeds of two to twenty miles per hour defined the limited range and long lengths of time required to complete a journey. These barriers to mobility would be obliterated with the arrival of portable steam power in the eighteenth century.
Technological Innovation Accelerates Transportation
While steam power fueled factories and centralized the organization of productive labor thereto, its power was also being harnessed for transportation. The first successful commercial application of steam power was the 1807 steamboat service established by Robert Fulton on the Hudson River in New York. Its ability to move people and cargo at greatly reduced shipping costs was leveraged with the development of canals in the 1820s to open up the North American interior to settlement. Steamboats traversed the Great Lakes and traveled the rivers of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. By the 1840s, ocean-going steam-powered vessels were crossing the Atlantic.
As ship construction evolved with iron hulls and screw propellers, steamships carried more cargo than the sailing ships. At the beginning of the twentieth century, sailing ships were no longer used for ocean trading.
Land transportation also took advantage of the reduced costs to move people and cargo from place to place. This was recognized in England with the successful 1804 demonstration of Richard Trevithick's railroad steam locomotive. By 1825, the first commercial carrier to use steam locomotives was in service, the Stockton and Darlington Railway. It was successful but received little recognition. George Stephenson tried something more impressive. He designed a powerful new locomotive to be used on the Liverpool and Manchester route. The Rocket achieved a top speed of 12 ½ miles per hour and could pull three times its own weight. It was an overwhelming success and in its inaugural year the Rocket carried over 70,000 passengers and hauled 4,000 tons of freight. This was a triumph for portable steam technology as the demands of the era for speed were being heard.
Speed was achieved with the rapid growth of railways in England and around the world. In 1841, England had only 1,600 miles of railway, but by the start of the twentieth century, it had 22,000 miles of track in place. Rapid adoption, of railways and steam locomotives, was found in the United States too. In the 1830s the railways served as inland feeders to ocean ports, furthering settlement of the interior, and by the 1850s, the Midwest was connected to the Atlantic seaboard. Railway track could not be laid fast enough. In 1830 the United States had almost no track in operation, a paltry 23 miles. By 1870 the amount of track in operation was 52,922 miles.
The practical application of portable steam technology on water and over land enabled freedom of mobility over great distances and brought people together. Railways and steamships dominated the transportation scene for over one hundred years.
By the middle of the twentieth century the automobile and airplane had replaced the train and ocean liners, respectively, as the principal passenger carriers. The automobile provided personal mobility for both local and long distance travel. The airplane shrank distance and reduced time by another order of magnitude; a transcontinental trip took five hours by air instead of five days by land, while a ten-hour flight over the ocean replaced the two-week duration of an ocean voyage. In terms of cargo, railways saw increasing competition from trucks and pipelines over land, while ocean-liners were transformed into container ships and super-tankers.
Personal Mobility Arrives in the 20th Century
Three conditions came together in the twentieth century for the unprecedented rise and acceptance of the automobile. First, the union of technology in the form of the internal combustion engine and the mass production process of Ranson Eli’s Oldsmobile in 1901 coupled with Henry Ford's moving assembly lines in 1913 provided cost-effective transport, the automobile. Second, paved highways were being built at a feverish pace to ensure smooth rides for speeds beyond a bicycle's typical ten mile per hour clip. The horse, due to its cost of upkeep and need for specialized space and attention, was replaced by the bicycle for short trips and the automobile for long trips.
Finally, the third condition for increased demand for the automobile was the number of destinations that could be reached. Commutes to work were made daily, visits to extended family members were made regularly, and vacations to increasingly diverse and sophisticated vacation spots were made periodically, especially during the summer months. The automobile served all of these purposes. It simply required periodic maintenance and a steady diet of gasoline from the many petrol stops that emerged along the new roadways.
The emergence of the low cost automobile broke the link between wealth and mobility. As in ancient times, the elite traveled while the working class did not travel. The ubiquity of the automobile was a great equalizer. It meant that private transportation was available to the worker, just like that used by his or her employer. The independence of mobility was a major boost for democracy. By the end of 1929, over 4.4 million cars were sold each year in the United States and more than twenty-three million cars were traveling the roadways, one for every five Americans. By the end of 1996, over 200 million personal vehicles were operating on American roads, almost four cars for every five Americans. The automobile dominated the daily lives of Americans.
Transportation Takes Wing in the 20th Century Too
Travel by land and water was becoming more and more varied as scientific principles were applied to increase the speed of human mobility across the surface of the planet. Astronomy inspired humanity to gaze upward and dream of flying to the moon and other planets. The rise of chemistry and understanding of the properties of gases enabled competing approaches towards lighter-than-air balloons to take flight. This was the first step towards reaching other planets, the conquering of the stratosphere.
Lighter-than-air balloons were limited by their speed, ease of control, and cargo-carrying capacity. Heavier-than-air craft were needed to overcome these obstacles to become a viable alternative to rail and ship transport. The first successful heavier-than-air craft took flight in 1903. Orville and Wilbur Wright did this at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and their man-carrying achievement led to one of the most rapid advances in the field of transportation, flight.
The Second World War drove the development of multi-engine airplanes. Advances in reliable electronic navigation and improved weather forecasting contributed to the rapid increase in commercial air transportation in the 1940s. Concurrent with this increase in airplanes for long distance passenger travel was the rapid decline of the passenger shipping lines. Ocean-going vessels were relegated to the role of cargo transport as the movement of natural resources or large finished goods did not require the urgency of speed in being moved from exporter to importer.
The railway suffered the same fate as the ocean liner. Rail's demise as a passenger carrier was further accelerated not only by the airplane, but also by the use of the automobile for passenger movement, and introduction of pipelines for movement of natural resources such as oil. The culprit was jet power introduced to commercial air service in the 1950s. Speeds were doubled and costs were greatly reduced. An all day flight now became a morning or afternoon commute. The demand for rapid mobility was unprecedented. Consequently, the 1960s saw the introduction of jumbo jet aircraft, with the ability to carry almost five hundred passengers over great distances. The stratosphere was conquered and international cooperation provided for round-the-clock, safe air travel.
People were on the move terrestrially and stratospherically. Travel beyond earth's atmosphere first occurred without people directly. Planet earth was explored from orbit by satellites launched in the 1950s. Planetary exploration began with the first space probes leaving for other planets in the 1960s. In less than twenty-five years of space flight, unmanned spacecraft had visited all of the planets known to the ancient world. Manned spaceflight, the beginning of a new mode of transportation, began in earnest in the 1960s, with the culmination of the first moon landing in 1969. Concurrent with manned exploration of the moon, the 1970s also saw robotic exploration of Mars as the Viking explorers beamed the first pictures of the Red Planet back to earth. By the end of the 1970s, Mercury had been encountered once, Venus fifteen times, Mars fourteen times, Jupiter four times and Saturn once.
Competition in space began to give way to cooperation as evidenced by the joint American and Russian project to test an international docking mechanism, jointly developed, to be used in rendering aid in emergency situations. Skylab, NASA's orbiting space laboratory, was the facility used to dock both an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft. Skylab pointed the way to the development of reusable spacecraft and to the establishment of a permanent home in space. From this work and foresight, the United States developed its fleet of space shuttles and the international community, in the spirit of cooperation and joint funding, developed the International Space Station.
NASA’s space shuttle was the largest craft ever put into orbit and engineering was critical as the orbiter had to be launched like a rocket, orbit like a satellite, re-enter the atmosphere like other spacecraft, and land on Earth just like a glider. The weight of the shuttle required greater thrust at takeoff. Strap-on solid fuel rockets were used instead of the traditional liquid fuel types. These booster rockets provided greater thrust than the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo program and achieved full power in 4/100ths of a second, accelerating the space shuttle skyward much more rapidly than the Apollo or Skylab launches. The other benefits were the reusability of the solid booster rockets, which fell back to earth after their two-minute burn and subsequent recovery at sea, and the reusability of the orbiter itself after its return from space at the completion of its space mission.
The first Space Shuttle launch took place in 1981 and three of the five orbiters built remain in operation after twenty-three years of flights. The space shuttle fleet has served as cargo ships. They ferry satellites, military hardware, and passengers into space and bring them back.
The shuttle launches new satellites, retrieves broken satellites for repair, and deploys a variety of other equipment into orbit such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The space shuttle also plays a key role in ferrying parts for the International Space Station currently under construction.
The uniqueness of the International Space Station can be found in the unprecedented level of collaboration among many nations in its construction. Canada built a robotic arm used to assemble the Space Station. Russia provided a Service Module for the crew’s living quarters, two research modules, solar arrays, which produce twenty kilowatts of electricity, and the Soyuz spacecraft to shuttle crews to and from Earth. Japan, Brazil, and Italy also provided Space Station equipment. The European Space Agency built a pressurized laboratory for space experiments called the Columbus Module to be launched on a future flight and the Ariane rockets to carry logistics transport vehicles, such as the MPLMs, from earth. Such collaboration for human self-sufficiency in space is the next step in our quest to colonize other planets of our Solar System. If the history of human civilization is a guide, interplanetary travel and colonization remains the last remaining frontier for conquest and empire.
The need for different types of transportation will endure as long as humanity craves mobility. Technology's value to transportation is in bringing that mobility, decreasing terrestrial time and distance, and eliminating isolation experienced by many people. Transportation hubs will always serve the social needs of humanity. They have taken the form of Roman highway intersections, Inca bridge crossings, European seaports, American airports, and International spaceports. It is the continual venue change for human interaction and economic transactions, which prevent social isolation, avoid stagnation of the human spirit, and prevent reversals in the quality of life.
bravenet.com