Early nineteenth-century technological innovations in transportation that began with the invention of the steam engine.
The steam engine was invented in 1698 and was used to pump water out of coal mines. James Watt improved the design in 1763. In 1830, it came into common use in the United States to pull trains. Before that time, roads, sailing vessels, and canals dominated transportation in the United States. Turnpikes connecting the Atlantic states dominated interior travel, which was by horse and buggy. Sailing vessels dominated coastal transport, but steamboats displaced them after 1815. By the 1830s railroads replaced canals as an important mode of transportation; using the new steam engines, railroads connected the country and revolutionized transportation.
Before 1824, the federal government played a limited role in transportation. Congress granted one exception and helped with construction of the National Road by funding it via sales revenues from 5 percent of Ohio land that the federal government owned and sold to settlers or investors. However, transport over roads remained slow. The federal government, partly because of opposition to its involvement with the National Road, stayed out of the road-building business until 1916 after the invention of the automobile, when another revolution in transportation occurred.
Strict constructionists argued that the Constitution did not grant the federal government power to fund internal transportation improvements. This perspective changed when the Supreme Court issued its decision in the 1824 case of Gibbons v. Ogden. Although the case involved steamboat travel in New York, the decision strengthened the power of the U.S. government because it established national supremacy in regulating interstate commerce. Based on the Court’s ruling, the government could support transportation as a matter of interstate commerce. The decision also became the basis for government regulation of railroads in 1887.
The government used subsidies to encourage the transportation revolution in the nineteenth century. The United States bought stock in canal, steamship, and turnpike companies and funded the building of telegraph lines so station masters could communicate about arrival and departure times and conduct other railroad business. Western states granted free land to railroad companies, which sold the land at a profit so it could fund construction of the railroad tracks. Congress provided government surveyors to help companies lay out transportation routes, and it reduced tariffs on materials such as iron used to build railroad tracks. In 1850, Congress gave land grants to three railroads—Illinois Central, Mobile, and Ohio—to connect Illinois with the South. Such subsidies helped to connect the continent by the 1870s and allowed farmers to take part in a national economy. Being able to transport their produce to distant markets via railroads allowed farmers to move from subsistence to the market economy.
The land grant also set a precedent for the next two decades. Based on the 1850 act, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, authorizing land grants and cash premiums up to $48,000 per mile of track for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies, which were building a transcontinental railroad. Congress issued a similar grant in 1864 to the Northern Pacific. The government transferred 131 million acres to railroad companies and through their efforts connected the continent by the 1870s.
The era of railroads ended after another transportation revolution occurred in the early twentieth century. The invention of the automobile led to passage of the Federal Highways Act in 1916. This act provided for construction of a national road system connecting far-flung areas of the country and furthering economic development. In the 1920s, passenger travel began a steady decline, and by 1971 Congress created Amtrak to serve intercity and passenger train travel. The government has continued to provide assistance to Amtrak, which had never operated profitably.
The most recent form of transportation to develop was the airplane. Limited passenger travel started in 1912 with the zeppelin airship. The U.S. government began subsidizing the airline industry in 1919 by sending mail by air. As a result of these subsidies the airline industry expanded; new companies such as Pan Am, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Delta formed between 1928 and 1931. In 1930 only a few thousand people traveled by air; that number increased to 2 million passengers per year by 1930. Passenger travel boomed after World War II; 16.7 million passengers per year traveled by air in 1949. The development of jet airliners reduced flight times and fares, and by 1988 more than 455 million passengers per year traveled by air. The airline industry continued to enjoy prosperity until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The dramatic decline in air travel since then has forced many airlines close to bankruptcy, and they compete for passengers by slashing fares. In 2002 Congress authorized a $15 billion bailout package for the airlines.
