Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872. His protagonists, Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, made their journey at a surprisingly low average speed -- only around ten miles-an-hour. That seems odd -- a science fiction writer letting realism so temper our prurient fascination with speed.
But that was late in the game. There was less restraint early in the century. An 1831 painting by Bury shows a primitive train slicing across England's patchwork fields on a straight, willful line of track. Clouds gather over it; Turner's rain is about to fall; speed is upon us.
Turner's indistinct and mystic train is shown crossing Isambard Kingdom Brunel's very real Maidenhead Bridge -- a sly reference to the irrevocable change locomotives brought with them, no doubt. The coming of speed carried its dimension of menace.
What we invented in the nineteenth century was more than the sum of the parts. Not trains, steamships, or airships, but all of them. It was speed -- pure, hedonistic, and inexorable speed. Speeds kept increasing until, in 1907, a Stanley Steamer was clocked at the astonishing speed of 150 miles an hour.
America was already into the railway game when Stephenson was getting started. And we pushed the technology far more recklessly than Great Britain had. We went to higher steam pressures, laid track with less caution, invented on the fly as we went along. And we built for speed. As the nineteenth century began, our most poignant experiences of speed had all been short bursts -- diving, swinging on a rope, riding fast horses. A horse can't run much faster than a person. But to ride upon one in full gallop -- to be conjoined with an animal eight times your weight and moving at speeds that're literally breakneck -- that's heady stuff.
Bayard Taylor was typical of the nineteenth-century writers and poets who tried to express the sensate force of a horse in motion. This is how he began his Bedouin Song in 1853:
From the desert I came to thee
On a stallion shod with fire,
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Soon enough, we'd learn to leave the winds far behind, for the horse had merely teased us --- taunted us with as much as forty miles an hour, but only for a minute or two at a time.
Speed began permeating our language. In his 1841 Essay on Prudence, Emerson saw that our fixation on speed went way beyond vehicles. Rapidity in all its forms had become a Yankee trait -- perhaps even a virtue:
Our Yankee trade ... [He wrote] takes bank-notes, -- good, bad, clean, ragged, -- and saves itself by the speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
We Americans were like spit on a hot stove, always in motion. Fast horses had been enticing because they were dangerous. Now, in a peculiar inversion of that idea, Emerson offers speed as protection from the dangers around us in our raw new land.
Rapidity may've offered means for eluding danger. But the danger of speed was, itself, a lure -- tempting us to skate over all kinds of thin ice we'd otherwise have avoided. Soon after Emerson, American diarist Philip Hone sounded a note of regret at all this escalating speed. In 1844 he wrote, "By and by we shall have balloons pass over to London between sun and sun. Oh for the good old days of heavy post-coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!" Well, that was the same year Turner painted Rain, Steam, and Speed.
Walt Whitman saw what was going on with great clarity. In 1855, he began writing his song to America, The Leaves of Grass. He celebrated all the new technologies, but none so eloquently as rail. By 1876, he'd added a poem: Locomotive in Winter. None of Verne's restraint here: "Type of the modern," he calls the great new locomotives, "emblem of motion and power -- pulse of the continent." He finishes with these lines and we can fairly taste the manic momentum now driving us:
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
...
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd,
Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.
There now seemed no limit to speed. For the next seventy years, records of actual locomotive speeds are all flawed by the same hope and excitement that touched Fanny Kemble. Hold any nineteenth-century locomotive speed record up to the light, and you see how it might've been fudged.
Example: May 10, 1893: In conjunction with the Chicago Columbian exposition, the New York Central & Hudson River railway did a trial run of their Empire State Express No. 999, in upstate New York. Recorders on board clocked it at 82 miles-an-hour, and that's all that the owners claimed. But unofficial timers claimed to have clocked it at 112 miles-an-hour. That's the record you read about in books or see in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
Empire State Express No. 999 (Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, photo by author)
No matter the many exaggerations. Great speed had been accomplished on rails. Now the mantle would pass to automobiles powered, first by steam, then internal combustion. After WW-I, airplanes would set the records. We invented many transportation technologies during the nineteenth century, but the gnawing, underlying motivation for those machines was speed.
As we reached even higher speeds in the twentieth century, our interest flagged. Now, while space vehicles travel at orbital velocities, our attention turns to computers and biotechnology.
Maybe we're saner. But I still remember trying to fly through the air on my toboggan. I remember racing ahead of the wind on my bicycle. I remember an age when speed still held an otherworldly wonder for us all.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
- B. Taylor, Bedouin Song. The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor: Household Edition with Illustrations. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1907).
- W. Emerson, Prudence. Essays. First and Second Series, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. c.1883)
- P. Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851. (ed. with an introduction by Allan Nevins) (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936/1927).
- See, e.g., W. Whitman, The Leaves of Grass. (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1940): pg. 286.