As this fascinating paper notes, the process of building with cement had reached a high point during the Roman Empire, only to be “lost” until its reinvention in the early 13thcentury.
In today’s world, there is at least one technology in America that is worse now than it was in the early 20th century: the train. The United States has lost not so much the technology of rail speed as the public will, the cultural memory; this may have made sense for a historical period, but now, weighed in terms of the congestion, carbon emissions, and comfort of other travel modes, it seems time to reach for the way-back machine.
As journalist Philip Longman has pointed out, where “fast mail trains” once “ensured next-day delivery on a letter mailed with a standard two-cent stamp in New York to points as far west as Chicago,” today, “that same letter is likely to travel by air first to FedEx’s Memphis hub, then be unloaded, sorted, and reloaded onto another plane, a process that demands far greater expenditures of money, carbon, fuel, and, in many instances, time than the one used eighty years ago.”
Does it seem like maybe, just maybe, we have taken the speed of our society in the wrong direction? Could trucks and airplanes be the wrong answer? Why have things somehow become more complicated when computers should be making things more simple? I think it’s time we take a closer look at our locomotive infrastructure and determine what our future will be—and if we can slow down the [excessive] use of money, fuel, and time.
Thanks to Slate
