Most of us learned something about the space/time continuum in high school physics class; part of the Einsteinian revolution of the early 20C. It’s a pretty bold idea: that what we perceive as space/area/distance and what we perceive as time/duration/speed are not separate but is an integrated concept. Without specifying all four dimensions (time, length, depth, width), you don’t have a clear picture of where/when anything is in the universe.
However, since physics is pretty much outside my ken, my topic today is more mundane and terrestrial: how do we adapt this profound model to the world of social and economic relations and how has this all changed over time. I’ll start with an example from my own experience. Twenty-some years ago, I took a hiking trip to Switzerland with a couple of buddies. As we were tromping from town-to-town, I was struck by the fact that the Swiss trail signs didn’t indicate the distance from Leukerbad to Lens (~ 16km), but rather the time it would take to walk there (6-7 hours). I figured that since people walk at different paces, one couldn’t come up with a standard estimate of the necessary time. I was wrong, of course; the Swiss had it nailed. More importantly for my point here, they highlighted the interchangeability of space and time at a very practical level.
I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve been giving a set of lectures on the history of globalization. This sprawling topic encompasses not only the movement of people, things, and ideas in gradually broader and more interconnected networks, but also the extent to which people are aware of the size of their “world.” In other words, we can look at globalization as an example of a space-time continuum and one that has evolved over the millennia as a function of technologies ranging from goat paths to asphalt to turbine engines to fiber optic undersea cables.
In pre-modern times, outside of astronomical calculations, most folks weren’t too concerned with precise measurement of either time or distance. The connection, however, was built implicitly into people’s consciousness. Modern Swiss trail markers are the descendants of the markers on Roman roads which measured “distance” in terms of days.
From a historical perspective, we can measure the progress of technologies in terms of increased speed of transportation and communications. On the rough roads of medieval Europe (or elsewhere in the pre-modern world) walking 25-35 km/day was about normal, riding a horse would boost that to 50 km or so. For most folks in most circumstances, this standard was only slightly improved until the 19C. This meant riding from Vienna to Paris (~1200 km) took about 25 days; walking would take about six weeks.
The development of a messenger service (for the Habsburg Empire) led to the creation of a relay-messenger service (a precursor of the Pony Express in the 19C US) which could carry a message in 15 days by 1600 (the guy who ran this project was called “Taxis,” which is where we get the modern (pre-Uber) term for carriage for hire). In the 17 and 18C, improvement to roads cut the time for a fast mail coach to 7 days.
The 19C saw the introduction of powered trains and telegraphs. The Orient Express would run from Vienna to Paris in 14 hours. By 1900, the telegraph would communicate words almost instantly. Indeed, the arrival of the telegraph finally led to a divergence between what we call communications and transportation.
Before I go further in this story, I should emphasize that European standards were the peak of human technology at the time, and the increased speeds only applied in very limited circumstances. It could still take weeks to traverse comparable distances between places that were rural, since there was no train from southwest France to northern Bavaria. Moreover, the cost of these “modern” options was out of the reach of almost all people. The story in Africa, Asia, and South America was still more sparse. It took decades to build out roads and rails and wires; a process which is still going on in many places around the world a full two centuries after the first railway began operations.
By the 20C, aviation brought further acceleration. The flight from Paris to Vienna runs under two hours. Telephony similarly accelerated communications and the shift to underseas telephone calls (now on fiber) and satellite calls helped drive down costs and vastly expand the availability of such services. A phone call from Los Angeles to London in 1927 cost $750 for ten minutes (2024 dollars), using the brand new radio system. International Direct Distance Dialing arrived in 1970, the same call now cost only $100 (2024 dollars). Competition and new technologies brought that crashing down to $5 for ten minutes by the turn of the millennium; a curve which has accelerated to the current situation where we can call pretty much anywhere in the world instantly for free. Wow!
There are two salient points to be drawn from this technological progress. The first is that the radical reductions in cost have been a major spur to globalization. More stuff (goods and people and ideas) move from one part of the world to another when it becomes cheaper to do so. At the high end, that means bopping off to Paris for a long weekend (as I often do!). For most folks, it means that economy/steerage class becomes cheap enough to seek new opportunities in the new world, as has happened a lot over the last 200 years.
Second, we can see the space-time continuum in practice. As the massive pandemic-accelerated shift in work habits and world conceptualization driven by video conferencing has shown, distance is trivialized and Zoom et al. have become wormholes in space. I have a friend in Seattle whose daughter lives in Ireland. They text and Facetime multiple times a week. Not much different than if she lived 45 miles away instead of 4500.
One hundred and thirty years ago, my great-grandparents embarked on journeys from the “Old World” to the “New,” expecting never to see their families again. Thirteen years ago, I was expected to live near enough to my workplace that I could show up every day. Both those worlds are gone, reshaped into a new configuration.
However, since physics is pretty much outside my ken, my topic today is more mundane and terrestrial: how do we adapt this profound model to the world of social and economic relations and how has this all changed over time. I’ll start with an example from my own experience. Twenty-some years ago, I took a hiking trip to Switzerland with a couple of buddies. As we were tromping from town-to-town, I was struck by the fact that the Swiss trail signs didn’t indicate the distance from Leukerbad to Lens (~ 16km), but rather the time it would take to walk there (6-7 hours). I figured that since people walk at different paces, one couldn’t come up with a standard estimate of the necessary time. I was wrong, of course; the Swiss had it nailed. More importantly for my point here, they highlighted the interchangeability of space and time at a very practical level.
I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve been giving a set of lectures on the history of globalization. This sprawling topic encompasses not only the movement of people, things, and ideas in gradually broader and more interconnected networks, but also the extent to which people are aware of the size of their “world.” In other words, we can look at globalization as an example of a space-time continuum and one that has evolved over the millennia as a function of technologies ranging from goat paths to asphalt to turbine engines to fiber optic undersea cables.
In pre-modern times, outside of astronomical calculations, most folks weren’t too concerned with precise measurement of either time or distance. The connection, however, was built implicitly into people’s consciousness. Modern Swiss trail markers are the descendants of the markers on Roman roads which measured “distance” in terms of days.
From a historical perspective, we can measure the progress of technologies in terms of increased speed of transportation and communications. On the rough roads of medieval Europe (or elsewhere in the pre-modern world) walking 25-35 km/day was about normal, riding a horse would boost that to 50 km or so. For most folks in most circumstances, this standard was only slightly improved until the 19C. This meant riding from Vienna to Paris (~1200 km) took about 25 days; walking would take about six weeks.
The development of a messenger service (for the Habsburg Empire) led to the creation of a relay-messenger service (a precursor of the Pony Express in the 19C US) which could carry a message in 15 days by 1600 (the guy who ran this project was called “Taxis,” which is where we get the modern (pre-Uber) term for carriage for hire). In the 17 and 18C, improvement to roads cut the time for a fast mail coach to 7 days.
The 19C saw the introduction of powered trains and telegraphs. The Orient Express would run from Vienna to Paris in 14 hours. By 1900, the telegraph would communicate words almost instantly. Indeed, the arrival of the telegraph finally led to a divergence between what we call communications and transportation.
Before I go further in this story, I should emphasize that European standards were the peak of human technology at the time, and the increased speeds only applied in very limited circumstances. It could still take weeks to traverse comparable distances between places that were rural, since there was no train from southwest France to northern Bavaria. Moreover, the cost of these “modern” options was out of the reach of almost all people. The story in Africa, Asia, and South America was still more sparse. It took decades to build out roads and rails and wires; a process which is still going on in many places around the world a full two centuries after the first railway began operations.
By the 20C, aviation brought further acceleration. The flight from Paris to Vienna runs under two hours. Telephony similarly accelerated communications and the shift to underseas telephone calls (now on fiber) and satellite calls helped drive down costs and vastly expand the availability of such services. A phone call from Los Angeles to London in 1927 cost $750 for ten minutes (2024 dollars), using the brand new radio system. International Direct Distance Dialing arrived in 1970, the same call now cost only $100 (2024 dollars). Competition and new technologies brought that crashing down to $5 for ten minutes by the turn of the millennium; a curve which has accelerated to the current situation where we can call pretty much anywhere in the world instantly for free. Wow!
There are two salient points to be drawn from this technological progress. The first is that the radical reductions in cost have been a major spur to globalization. More stuff (goods and people and ideas) move from one part of the world to another when it becomes cheaper to do so. At the high end, that means bopping off to Paris for a long weekend (as I often do!). For most folks, it means that economy/steerage class becomes cheap enough to seek new opportunities in the new world, as has happened a lot over the last 200 years.
Second, we can see the space-time continuum in practice. As the massive pandemic-accelerated shift in work habits and world conceptualization driven by video conferencing has shown, distance is trivialized and Zoom et al. have become wormholes in space. I have a friend in Seattle whose daughter lives in Ireland. They text and Facetime multiple times a week. Not much different than if she lived 45 miles away instead of 4500.
One hundred and thirty years ago, my great-grandparents embarked on journeys from the “Old World” to the “New,” expecting never to see their families again. Thirteen years ago, I was expected to live near enough to my workplace that I could show up every day. Both those worlds are gone, reshaped into a new configuration.
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