Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 105

on the ocean at any time of the year. Early eyewitnesses of the steamboat
were surprised that it traveled in a straight line.
The first steamships operated entirely on inland bodies of water and had

paddle wheels. Because early steam engines required a continuous supply of
fresh water, the technology was amenable to North America, with its large
rivers and lakes (Cardwell 1995). In 1798, initial e

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orts to develop steam
navigation began on the Hudson River, resulting in a whopping three miles
per hour (Vance 1990). In 1807, Robert Fulton deployed the

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first steamship
on the Hudson River, and in 1811 did so again on the Mississippi, going from
Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and initiating the process by which that river would
become the continent's major commercial arterial. By 1818, steamboats had
begun to ply the Great Lakes, laying the foundations for the later growth of
urban centers in the region. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, steam-
boats were instrumental in the development of the Mississippi and Ohio river
valleys (Mark and Walton 1972), where they halved transport costs and
times, placing much of the continental interior within easy access of New
Orleans, which emerged as the nation's largest port. Major bene

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fi ciaries of

this change included St. Louis.
The inability to use salt water made ocean-going steamships an impossibil-
ity until the reliable surface condenser was developed for marine engines,
an innovation that revolutionized the transatlantic trade as freshwater steam-
boats metamorphosed into ocean-going steamships (Figure 4.6). Trans-
atlantic service began with the Savannah 's crossing in 1819 from Charleston
to Liverpool, which took 29 days, much of the time using sails to complement
steam. The first true steamship to cross the Atlantic, the Sirius , left Ireland in

1838 to enter the port of New York. The following year, bimonthly service
became the norm. Steamships attained steadily higher maximum speeds,
which increased further with the introduction of diesel engines (Table 4.2).
By the 1850s, the normal duration of the trip from Britain to New York
had fallen to 14 days, half of what it was 30 years earlier. Fierce competi-
tion between British, French, and American carriers fueled this time-space
and cost-space compression, and shifted the market from low-income pas-
sengers to cruise ships in the late nineteenth century. In addition to attempt-
ing to lure as many passengers as possible across the Atlantic (typically
2,500 each), many steamships served the express mail service. As with the
railroad, far from simply re

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ecting the turnover of private capital, there-
fore, maritime time-space compression also was driven by imperatives of the
state.

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Table 4.2 Maximum attainable steamship velocities (mph), 1798-1951

1798 1819 1843 1858 1897 1907 1914 1938 1951

3 8 11 13 22 27 28 31 34

Source: Vance 1990.