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Entry 184 of 240Invention

The Railway Age

1830 CE/British Isles/Britain
Today England (the Liverpool & Manchester line)Span Railway age · 1830 onward

The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway proved that steam locomotives could move people and goods faster than a horse could run, and within decades rails webbed across continents. Railways compressed distance, standardized time itself — local sun-time gave way to timetables and time zones — and let states and armies reach where they never had. They also produced the era's great speculative frenzy, as investors poured fortunes into lines that were never built.

◆ Worth knowingBefore railways, every town kept its own clock by the sun — Bristol ran ten minutes behind London. Timetables made that unworkable, so Britain imposed a single standard time, and the world's time zones follow from the need to catch a train.
◆ The mechanismLabor displacement

A new technology destroys and creates work faster than institutions and people can adapt, producing dislocation and backlash.

Also: Trade-route shift · Mania & panic

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