Our World
5
Transportation/Travel: How Far We Have Come
Transportation has come an extremely long way in terms of innovations and creative new inventions. From the wheel to the steam engine and finally to the modern car, we have come a long way from horse or mule powered carts as sources of transportation.
All of transportation depends on technology, whether it’s the wheel, the jet engine, or the bicycle. Transportation is not just technology—it’s a system of technology, people, energy, and money but advances in technology play a key role in shaping transportation systems, which in turn help to shape our lives, landscapes, and culture.
Transportation is so important to commerce, that so much is riding on it. As a subject or merely object of interest, it has been the focus of an enormous amount of inventive activity. Corporations, for example, have invested billions of dollars in improved technology. Individuals, also, have sought their fortunes in breakthroughs big and small.
Transportation technology includes many related areas. Motive power, or the use of an engine, of course, is one aspect of technology. Early vehicles were pulled by human or animal power. Steam engines powered locomotives and ships in the ninetheenth century. The internal-combustion engine was invented in the 1880s and used almost immediately in cars and trucks. The jet engine was invented in the 1940s. Each of these inventions were improved or built upon by thousands of previous innovations. until it got to the point it is at today. But less-obvious technologies also made transportation cheaper and faster. Manufacturing innovations, from Baldwin Locomotive Works’ record-keeping systems to Henry Ford’s assembly line to the Toyota system of just-in-time inventory, made personal transportation affordable.
Innovations in control systems were also essential. Railroads invented new management techniques as well as switching and communications systems to keep the trains on track and on time. Highway engineers developed traffic lights, interchanges, and a thousand other design and control systems to keep traffic moving.
Through transportation and its improvements, we have greatly increase the amount of cultural diffusion, traveled greater distances in such a small amount of time, and have enormously increased interaction between distant lands through trade or political relations.