Significant transport acceleration preceded steam engines and telegraphs by decades
Evidence
The premechanical increase in speed had been apparent in many ways since the seventeenth century. The construction of networks of roads and canals increased the volume of freight and the distance it could be carried… . The average speed of private carriages on French roads more than doubled from 1814 to 1848, from 4.5 to 9.5 kilometers per hour. In Prussia during the same period the time of the mail coach journey from Berlin to Cologne shrank from 130 to 78 hours… . We find another precursor of increasing speed in the seas. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, North Americans developed the clipper ship, a narrow sailing ship with tall masts, which cut the time to travel from New York around Cape Horn to San Francisco (19,000 km) from 150–190 to 90 days[,] … an average speed of around 15 nautical miles per hour, which steam would only beat much later. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 303
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Modern acceleration began in distribution and trade, not in production — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 453; Boom-producing surface motion involves extreme acceleration but modest velocity; Transport acceleration is better measured by throughput than by top speeds — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 249