How did steam engines and railroads change the way people traveled?
The Shrinking World
How did steam engines and railroads change the way people traveled?
For most of human history, the fastest way to get anywhere was simple: find a horse, or use your own two feet. A journey that takes you an hour today could swallow an entire day. Then, in the early 1800s, a strange new beast came clanking down a pair of iron rails — and suddenly the whole world started to shrink.
The magic was hiding inside a kettle. Boil water and it turns to steam, and steam needs far more room than water did — so it pushes, hard, against anything in its way. A steam engine traps that pushing inside a metal cylinder, where it shoves a piston back and forth. That little back-and-forth was the heartbeat of an entire century.
