CHAPTER XV

COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION

The railway, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, and the cable have made possible interstate and international trade, minute divisions of labor, world markets, giant business corporations, great national states, the daily newspaper, and the conception of a League of Nations.

FRANK T. CARLTON SECTION I. How COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION DEVELOPED

Communication among primitive tribes. Before going on the warpath primitive tribes often sent one another, as a sign of hostility, a bundle of arrows tied with a rattlesnake skin; at other times they showed their warlike intentions by hurling a spear dipped in blood into the territory of their enemies. When they were at peace they seldom exchanged messages and goods.

To this last statement there are exceptions. Stanley found that the strange tribes he visited in central Africa had frequently received tidings of his coming long before his arrival by signals passed by the beating of large drums. The early explorers who traversed the interior of North America discovered, likewise, that Indians communicated with one another by means of smoke signals. But information or news circulated apparently only when some extraordinary event occurred.

Transportation among primitive tribes. Transportation of goods between different primitive peoples was also slight. If they lived in the same vicinity their products were so similar that there was little reason for exchange, while if they lived remote from one another they were often ignorant

of each other's existence. Their wants, moreover, were few and simple. What we know as commerce hardly went

on among them. There were markets in various parts of Africa, it is true, and articles like gold dust, ostrich plumes, and ivory tusks had been carried to the coast for centuries, but this trade was small in comparison with the trade of modern times.

Development of land transportation. In early days transportation methods were very simple. At first burdens were borne on the shoulders of men and women. Then dogs, cattle, horses, and camels were tamed and trained to carry loads or to drag them on branches of trees, poles, or rude sleds. Of course the load which a man or an animal could carry was small and the cost high. In our own Far West, when transportation was largely by means of pack mules, the cost was usually a dollar a pound every hundred miles. Under these conditions only articles which had great value in comparison with their size could be carried any distance. Early overland trade therefore was always limited to articles like precious stones, spices, fine fabrics, gold, silver, furs, and tobacco. When the wheel was invented, carts and wagons began to take the place of pack animals, the size of loads increased, and the cost of transportation dropped. Since roads were

CHINESE PORTER

In China human life is cheap and, in many sections, coolies, or workmen, are used to carry heavy burdens which in Europe or America would be transported by railroad or steamboat. This porter is carrying 317 pounds of brick tea hundreds of miles across the mountains.

useful for war as well as for trade, ancient rulers often constructed highways extending for hundreds of miles through their empires; the Roman emperors, for example, built splendid stone roads, some of which are in use today.

Development of water transportation. Transportation by land is usually more difficult and expensive than transportation by water. From the earliest times, therefore, man has made use of rivers, lakes, and seas-nature's highways-to carry himself and his burdens from place to place. A rude raft of logs pushed along by poles in shallow water and by flat pieces of wood in deep water was probably man's first boat. In time hollowed logs and, in America, birchbark canoes were invented. Except as he was carried along by the current, man depended at first on his own muscle for power. Then, one day, the idea of harnessing the wind to his raft, even as he yoked an ox to a cart, came into his mind. The result was the sailboat.

Raft, rowboat, and sailing craft were all inventions of primitive man. The ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans developed a large vessel called the galley ship,—a combination rowboat and sailing vessel,—which was used for both commerce and war. Several centuries later the long, narrow, shallow craft of the old Norse vikings proved well fitted for the daring raids of its masters up the rivers of France and England; it also served admirably for their bold voyages to Greenland and America.

The Crusades gave a great stimulus to water transportation. Many crusaders preferred to go to the Holy Land by sea rather than by land. To take them and their horses and supplies to the East and to bring back the large cargoes of goods desired in the West required the building of larger ships than had previously been used, while the necessity of regular voyages to and from Palestine, together with wider experience with the sea, taught sailors the art of tacking, or sailing against the wind. These two improvements and the invention of the compass and the astrolabe (an instrument

for measuring latitude) made possible the discoveries of such explorers as Columbus, Magellan, and Drake. About the same time Gutenberg invented the printing-press (1450) and furnished a means of spreading knowledge superior to any other method ever devised.

The Industrial Revolution and transportation. During the next three hundred years there were few improvements in communication and in

TOM THUMB

The Tom Thumb, built by Peter Cooper, Iwas one of the earliest locomotives manufactured in America. It made the trial trip over the Baltimore and Ohio, the first successful railroad in the country.

transportation.

Meas

ured by conditions when Julius Cæsar was alive, there was even an actual decline so far as land facilities were concerned. But with the coming of the factory and with the enormous increase in the output of manufactured goods, men endeavored as never before to better these agencies.

A Scotchman named Macadam invented a new method of roadbuilding which has been

known by his name ever since. Canals were dug in such numbers in England that the country became a network of artificial waterways. Railroads of wood and iron, on which cars were drawn by mules, had long been used in mines; attempts were now made to use them in overland transportation. Horse cars were tried; treadmills run by animals were introduced; even the use of sails was attempted. Finally, in 1814, George Stephenson invented the steam locomotive, and before many years railroads were built in all civilized countries. At the present time one can ride from New York to San Francisco in about ninety hours without needing to

lose a meal or a wink of sleep, and a single freight train, it is said, can carry more corn than could be transported on the backs of one million men.

While these improvements in land transportation were being made, attempts to use steam in water transportation

This huge engine, with its twenty-four drive wheels and a weight of more than four hundred tons, is said to be the most powerful steam locomotive in the world. It is used for pushing heavy trains up long grades. Contrast with the Tom Thumb.

resulted in 1807 in the successful trip of Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, from New York to Albany. Although many people declared a steamboat could never carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic by its own power, the Great Western performed the feat without difficulty in 1838 and transported a large cargo into the bargain.