Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

How Fast Information Travels, From 1805 Until Today

by Terrence O'Brien on September 6, 2009 at 09:51 AM


If you don't acknowledge that the speed at which information travels has drastically increased over the last two centuries, you're either painfully oblivious or dead. But have you ever wondered to what degree, exactly, we've become spoiled by instantaneous access to information from around the globe?

Well, your answer might lie in a chart that Beebo has pulled from the book 'A Farewell to Alms.' The table lists several historically significant events, how long it took for their news to reach London, and then converts those times to miles per hour. So, for example, news regarding the Battle of Trafalgar, which took place in 1805, reached London after 17 days. Since the battle took place 1,100 miles away, the news traveled at right around 2.7 mph. More recently, the assassination of Lincoln took 13 days to traverse the 3,674 miles between D.C. and London -- a comparatively fast 12 mph.


By comparison, the 2008 Sichaun earthquake saw its first English language news pop up on Twitter a mere seven minutes after it struck. Even if it took a full additional minute for someone in London to actually lay eyes on the tweet, news about the quake would have still crossed the 5,100 miles at an astonishing 38,250 mph.

As Jason Kottke (the sole author at Kottke.org) says, "Five orders of magnitude improvement in 200 years... not too shabby." We're inclined to agree. [From: Beebo, via Kottke.org]

Tags: communication, history, information, interesting, internet, telegraph, telephone, top

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular