Imagine if you can that you live in the southern state of
Georgia shortly after the revolutionary war. Your parents live in Virginia and
you want to send a letter to your father. Well there is a new United States
postal system so you write your letter and your father gets it in three to four
weeks. The early US Postal Service was concentrated in the major cities so if
you lived in the rural areas service tended to be on a weekly schedule. A
postal rider would ride a route once a week picking up and delivering mail.
Travel was by riverboat, horse, horse carriage, sailing ship, or foot. To
travel from Savannah, Ga. To New York, NY; by sailing ship took one to two
weeks, by horse or horse carriage took two to four weeks. These lengthy travel
and transportation times lead to a slower more agrarian lifestyle centered on
the cities. Next in the 1820s came the railroad expansion. The railroads
created easier travel between the towns along their routes. You could now send
a letter from Georgia to Virginia in about a week. Then Samuel Morse in 1838 developed his
telegraph system and the Morse Code. Now
communication from Georgia to Virginia took minutes to an hour depending on the
speed of the telegrapher and amount of message traffic. The postal system was
still widely used due to privacy issues with the telegraph. General news
traveled fast and now newspapers were able to be timelier with news from other
areas of the country. The next major communication advance was the invention of
the telephone in the late 1870 generally credited to Alexander Graham Bell. It
allowed for almost instant voice communication limited only to the availability
of the wires and telephone equipment. Now you could have a conversation to
someone anywhere in the United States limited only by the phone lines. The
telephone companies grew quickly and by the early 1900s telephones were becoming
common. Technologies lead to better equipment. The fax machine, early computers,
and finally the internet all improved communications.
A person can now talk to someone across the globe while
being able to see them. As our technology advances so does the speed and ease
of communication; making for an exciting future. Who knows maybe soon we will
be able to beam to the other side of the planet like in Star Trek. See you in
the Future; “Beam me up.” |
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