Sunday, July 12th, 2009
The book A Farewell to Alms is mostly about economic history, and specifically about how (in the author’s view) living standards were pretty stable and consistent for much of humanity until 1800, after which living standards increased dramatically in rich countries, and declined dramatically in poor countries, to the point where they are less well off than before 1800.
Anyway, part of this argument is a table showing how long in took for news of significant events to reach London. I thought this pretty interesting in itself–we’re not accustomed to news taking days or even hours to go around the world now, and even when reading history you usually get the impression that events were known immediately. (The dramatic speeding up of news reports around 1880 was a result of the invention and deployment of the telegraph.)
| Event | Year | Distance (miles) | Days until report | Speed (mph) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Battle of the Nile | 1798 | 2073 | 62 | 1.4 |
| Battle of Trafalgar | 1805 | 1100 | 17 | 2.7 |
| Earthquake, Kutch, India | 1819 | 4118 | 153 | 1.1 |
| Treaty of Nanking | 1842 | 5597 | 84 | 2.8 |
| Charge of the Light Brigade, Crimea | 1854 | 1646 | 17 | 4.0 |
| Indian Mutiny, Delhi Massacre | 1857 | 4176 | 46 | 3.8 |
| Treaty of Tien-Sin (China) | 1858 | 5140 | 82 | 2.6 |
| Assassination of Lincoln | 1865 | 3674 | 13 | 12 |
| Assassination of Archduke Maximilian, Mexico | 1867 | 5545 | 12 | 19 |
| Assassination of Alexander II, St. Petersburg | 1881 | 1309 | 0.46 | 119 |
| Nobi Earthquake, Japan | 1891 | 5916 | 1 | 246 |
September 1st, 2009 at 6:50 pm
What’s nifty about this is that if you plot out the numbers, the graph if flat until some point right after 1860.
The date of the first trans-Atlantic (telegraph) cable was 1866.
-a
September 1st, 2009 at 7:42 pm
[...] Interessant: sind wir heute “Instant”-Nachrichten gewohnt, brauchte es beispielsweise 1798 ganze 62 [...]
September 1st, 2009 at 8:55 pm
[...] between the audience and the reporter have been reduced to approximately 1. For example, in the 19th Century, information started picking up the pace moving from 1.4 mph to about 250 mph thanks to changes in travel technology. For instance, in 1805 the news of the Battle of Trafalgar [...]
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:20 am
[...] Shared Speed of Information Travel to London, 1798-1914 – Lately – Beebo [...]
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:49 am
I have always been fascinated by the fact that it took a week for the news of Lincoln’s assassination to reach San Francisco and only minutes for the news of Kennedy’s assassination to travel the same distance.
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:06 am
[...] Michael Stillwell pulled an interesting chart out of a book called A Farewell to Alms. It’s a table of the speed of important news reaching [...]
September 7th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
[...] sites like twitter. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case; the book A Farewell to Alms compares how long it took for major news events to be delivered to London in the 19th [...]
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