TRANSPORTATION, HISTORY OF

history of the methods used by humans to transport themselves and their goods, beginning with the use of other animals and incuding the development of wheeled vehicles, ships, and machine-powered vehicles. Most animals possess the power of locomotion, human beings perhaps most importantly though not perhaps most extravagantly. Some birds annually migrate over a distance approaching 40 percent of the Earth's circumference, flying over both land and water; and there are fish similarly capable of locomotion through the oceans that cover the planet's surface. Throughout history humans have been part of a much less numerous group of species capable of transporting goods in the course of their migrations. Until fairly recently humans depended upon harnessing exterior forces to aid them in their movement. Geophysical forces have always been present in currents of air and water; natural buoyancy has carried animals and humans over long distances as stowaways, and gravity has furnished considerable assistance to locomotion. All creatures may use these potential enhancements of mobility. What distinguishes humans from others is the ability to modify these natural forces in order to suit time and place objectives and ultimately to shape new and enlarged mechanical forces for locomotion. Transportation is any clear and deliberate effort to amplify human locomotion. Today there is a tendency to restrict the term to the mechanical enhancement of moving persons and goods, but this is too narrow a definition, as adventitious use of natural forces still plays an important role. No long-distance commercial flight operates without taking into consideration the current location of the jet stream and other aiding and opposing winds. Transatlantic crossings may vary by several hours' duration, depending on where the jet stream is that day and whether the route can be flown using a course with tailwinds rather than headwinds. By harnessing nature directly and indirectly, humans have been able to explore and exploit the Earth's resources. This article discusses the history of transportation. Coverage of the major modern means of transport is limited to mechanically powered vehicles; discussion of human-powered vehicles, such as the bicycle or canoe, as well as recreational, sporting, or pleasure craft, may be found in entries on those subjects. Only civil and commercial vehicles are included here; for a discussion of warships, military aircraft, and similar vehicles, see tank, naval ship, submarine, and military aircraft. For full treatment of the design and operation of power plants used in transportation vehicles (such as batteries and various types of engines), see internal-combustion engine, diesel engine, jet engine, electric motor, and battery. Rocketry is discussed in space exploration. Civil engineering projects used in transportation are covered in road and highway and other articles on public works: bridge; canal and inland waterway; harbours and sea works; and tunnel and underground excavation. For a discussion of the place of transportation history in a broader context, see technology. Additional reading Broad historical and geographic surveys of transportation with discussions of relevant economic aspects are provided in James E. Vance, Jr., Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation Since the Transportation Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1986); Simon P. Ville, Transport and the Development of the European Economy, 17501918 (1990); Frederick Wood, The Turnpikes of New England and Evolution of the Same Through England, Virginia, and Maryland (1919); James E. Vance, Jr., The Oregon Trail and Union Pacific Railroad: A Contrast in Purpose, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51:357379 (1961); Caroline E. MacGill et al., History of Transportation in the United States Before 1960 (1917, reissued 1948); and Edward C. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation: A Study in New England History, 18201900, 2 vol. (1948, reissued 1968).Development of the wheeled vehicle is introduced in Lszl Tarr, The History of the Carriage (1969; originally published in Hungarian, 1968). James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (1988), is a broad and detailed sociocultural history of the period dominated by motorcars and the automobile industry. The use of waterways is the subject of Charles Hadfield, The Canal Age, 2nd ed. (1981); and L.T.C. Rolt, From Sea to Sea: The Canal du Midi (1973). Christopher Lloyd and J. Douglas-Henry, Ships & Seamen: From the Vikings to the Present Day (1961), is a pictorial history of ships and those who sailed them. Histories of railroads frequently address their social and political impact, as in Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made (1990); Patrick O'Brien, Railways and the Economic Development of Western Europe, 18301914 (1983); Albro Martin, Railroads Triumphant: The Growth, Rejection, and Rebirth of a Vital American Force (1992); and Clarence B. Davis et al. (eds.), Railway Imperialism (1991). For the history of aviation, see C.H. Gibbs-Smith, Flight Through the Ages: A Complete Illustrated Chronology from the Dreams of Early History to the Age of Space Exploration (1974); L.T.C. Rolt, The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning, 17831903 (1966, reissued 1985); Carl Solberg, Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America (1979); R.E.G. Davies, A History of the World's Airlines (1964); and John Toland, Ships in the Sky: The Story of the Great Dirigibles (1957). James E. Vance, Jr. Machine-powered transportation The rise of the automobile The invention of the steam engine had a potential application for individual, as well as commercial, transportation. In 1769 Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot designed a small steam engine light enough to be borne on a land vehicle, a tricycle that he intended as a prime mover for French artillery pieces. The problem in steam vehicle development was to reduce sufficiently the size of the engine so its power could be used in transporting something other than itself. The age of steam Before any internal-combustion engine had run, Cugnot's successors were at work, notably in England, although the first post-Cugnot steam carriage appears to have been that built in Amiens, Fr., in 1790. Steam buses were running in Paris about 1800. Oliver Evans of Philadelphia ran an amphibious steam dredge through the streets of that city in 1805. Less well known were Nathan Read of Salem, Mass., and Apollo Kinsley of Hartford, Conn., both of whom ran steam vehicles during the period 17901800. English inventors were active, and by the 1830s the manufacture and use of steam road carriages was flourishing. James Watt's foreman, William Murdock, ran a model steam carriage on the roads of Cornwall in 1784, and Robert Fourness showed a working three-cylinder tractor in 1788. Watt was opposed to the use of steam engines for such purposes; his low-pressure steam engine would have been too bulky for road use in any case, and all the British efforts in steam derived from the earlier researches of Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen. Richard Trevithick developed Murdock's ideas, and at least one of his carriages, with driving wheels 10 feet in diameter, ran in London. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, the first commercially successful steam carriage builder, based his design upon an unusually efficient boiler. He was not, however, convinced that smooth wheels could grip a roadway, and so he arranged propulsion on his first vehicle by iron legs digging into the road surface. His second vehicle weighed only 3,000 pounds and was said to be capable of carrying six persons. He made trips as long as 84 miles in a running time of 9 hours 30 minutes and once recorded a speed of 17 miles per hour. Gurney equipment was used on a regularly scheduled Gloucester-Cheltenham service of four round-trips daily that at times did the nine miles in 45 minutes. Between February 27 and June 22, 1831, steam coaches ran 4,000 miles on this route, carrying some 3,000 passengers. The equipment was noisy, smoky, destructive of roadways, and admittedly dangerous; hostility arose, and it was common for drivers to find the way blocked with heaps of stones or felled trees. Nevertheless, many passengers had been carried by steam carriage before the railways had accepted their first paying passenger. The most successful era of the steam coaches in Britain was the 1830s. Ambitious routes were run, including one from London to Cambridge. But by 1840 it was clear that the steam carriages had little future. The decline of the steam carriage did not prevent continued effort in the field, and much attention was given to the steam tractor for use as a prime mover. Beginning about 1868 Britain was the scene of a vogue for light steam-powered personal carriages; if the popularity of these vehicles had not been legally hindered, it would certainly have resulted in widespread enthusiasm for motoring in the 1860s rather than in the 1890s. Some of the steamers could carry as few as two people and were capable of speeds of 20 miles per hour. The public climate remained unfriendly, however. Light steam cars were being built in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark during the same period, and it is possible to argue that the line from Cugnot's lumbering vehicle runs unbroken to the 20th-century steam automobiles made as late as 1926. The grip of the steam automobile on the American imagination has been strong ever since the era of the Stanley brothers (one of whose steamers took the world speed record at 127.66 miles per hour in 1906), and in the 1960s it was estimated that there were still 7,000 steam cars in the United States, about 1,000 of them in running order. Machine-powered transportation The most fundamental transformation that has ever taken place in transportation was the introduction of machine power to the traction or propulsion of vehicles. Specifically, for the first time in history power was produced within a vehicle from fuels that were either part of the original lading or periodically or continuously added to its charge. Energy production took place within a machine or reactor whose motions were transformed into tractive or propulsive movement. This change may be termed the arrival of the era of machine-powered transportation. The earliest engines were highly inefficient. They were used to pump water from mines or to refill reservoirs and later to wind cables in elevators within mines. The Boulton and Watt steam engines developed in England in the latter half of the 18th century could produce only a modest output in relation to their fuel consumption. Improvements that increased steam pressures above a single atmosphere allowed the size and weight of engines to be reduced so they might be installed in vehicles. Like a number of machines, the steam engine was not the invention of a single person in a single place, but James Watt, a builder of scientific instruments at the University of Glasgow, was most directly responsible for a successful design. Though it improved incrementally over a period of a generation, the steam engine was fully operable by 1788. Watt entered into a partnership in Birmingham in 1775 with the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, at whose Soho Works the firm constructed a total of 496 steam engines, many of which were used, as the earlier steam engines of the British engineer Thomas Newcomen had been, to pump water from mines or to operate waterworks. It was only at the end of Boulton and Watt's partnership that the machinery was applied to transport vehicles. The key to that introduction was in the creation of a more efficient steam engine. Early engines were powered by steam at normal sea-level atmospheric pressure (approximately 14.7 pounds per square inch), which required very large cylinders. The massive engines were thus essentially stationary in placement. Any attempt to make the engine itself mobile faced this problem. The French military engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot had made one of the first applications of higher-pressure steam when in 1769 he developed a tricycle (with two cylinders) at first intended as a tractor for moving cannon; this is commonly thought of as the first automobile. When two proponents of steam locomotionRichard Trevithick in Wales and Oliver Evans in Delaware and Pennsylvaniaconducted the earliest successful experiments with steam locomotives in the first decade of the 19th century, they both sought to use high-pressure steam. But most of the steam engines constructed and put to use in the last quarter of the 18th century were of Boulton and Watt manufacture and were large and rather weak. The steamboat This cumbersome quality of early 19th-century steam engines led to their being used first on ships. In the beginning the discordant relationship of machine weight to power production was a problem, but the ability to enlarge ships to a much greater size meant that the engines did not have to suffer severe diminution. A real constraint was the pattern of natural waterways; early steamboats for the most part depended on paddles to move the vessel, and it was found that those paddles tended to cause surface turbulence that eroded the banks of a narrow waterway, as most of the inland navigation canals were. Thus, the best locale for the operation of steamboats was found to be on fairly broad rivers free of excessively shallow stretches or rapids. A further consideration was speed. Most of the early experimental steamboats were very slow, commonly in the range of three or four miles per hour. At such speeds there was a considerable advantage redounding to coaches operating on well-constructed roads, which were quite common in France and regionally available in England. The ideal venue for steamboats seemed to be the rivers of the eastern United States. Colonial transportation had mainly taken place by water, either on the surfaces of coastal bays and sounds or on fairly broad rivers as far upstream as the lowest falls or rapids. Up to the beginning of the 19th century a system of coastal and inland navigation could care for most of the United States' transportation needs. If a successful steamboat could be developed, the market for its use was to be found in the young, rapidly industrializing country.