Saturday, December 16, 2017

Gary North: A Century of Change

Gary North reports:
The biggest difference between the world we live in today and the world of 1917 is in the cost of information. That cost has been driven down to levels inconceivable in 1917. The change had begun in 1844 with the invention of the telegraph. There has never been a technological change in history that was comparable in social impact to the changes that the telegraph brought. I like to use this illustration. In the time of Jesus, high-speed communications in the Roman Empire averaged about one mile per hour. In 1800, it averaged about 1.25 miles per hour. The development of the railroads in the 1830's began to speed up the transmission of information. Then came the telegraph. The first message was sent from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. The speed of information transmission went to 186,000 miles per second, minus the time it took for the telegrapher to tap out the message, and for the person at the other end of the line to write it down. The first message was appropriate: "what hath God wrought" -- without a character for a question mark. I can think of no other event since approximately A.D. 31 to which that phrase better applies. The telegraph, within a decade, became universal in what today would be called the developed world. The transatlantic cable was completed in 1858.

Yet even in the case of the telegraph, the full economic implications were not well understood. Three shortsighted investors started the Pony Express in 1859. It lasted 18 months before going bankrupt.

In my mother's youth, she listened to commercial radio. The first commercial radio broadcast was in the presidential election of 1920. Radio station KDKA of Pittsburgh broadcasted the results of the election. Within five years, radio stations were all over the nation. Radio in 1925 was becoming the universal entertainment medium in the United States, except on farms. Most farms did not yet have electricity.
An article, well worth your time.