by Ian Mortimer
Transport
This book is concerned with ‘the West’ – and in the twentieth century, ‘the West’ spread like spilt ink across the world. Most countries came to embrace aspects of Western culture through huge advances in the nature, extent and integration of international transport links. Whether my great-grandfather wore a suit in 1900 similar to the one I wear today is an insignificant matter compared to the fact that people in New Zealand, Argentina, Japan and China were also wearing suits on a daily basis in 2000. The fact that the English language hardly altered over the twentieth century is a minor point in comparison to it becoming the third most widely spoken tongue in the world and a lingua franca for the globe. Markets that had been purely local in 1800, and which had become national by 1900, became international in the twentieth century. Forces of demand and supply that were international before 1900 were global by 2000. And the greatest single change underlying this globalisation was the proliferation of the internal combustion engine.
The internal combustion engine was first developed by Étienne Lenoir around 1860, and applied to a tricycle shortly afterwards. Its commercial potential was realised in 1886, when Karl Benz borrowed the money from his wealthy wife, Bertha, and patented his petrol-fuelled three-wheeled car. Karl might have been a great engineer, but he was a lousy salesman. In August 1888 Bertha decided to do something about her husband’s shortcomings in the marketing department. She took one of his cars without telling him and set off from Mannheim with their two teenage children to visit her mother in Pforzheim, 65 miles away. The round trip of 130 miles was the first long-distance car journey ever made. People were astonished to see a horseless carriage trundling along the roads. When they saw it was driven by a woman, they were even more amazed. On the journey, Bertha acted as her own mechanic: clearing the fuel line with her hairpin and arranging for a shoemaker to improve the brakes by nailing leather on to the wooden brake blocks. But this trip was a great success: her expedition proved that the new invention was reliable. In 1894 Karl started to produce the four-wheeled Velo and sales took off. By 1900 his company was the largest manufacturer of motor vehicles in the world, turning out almost 500 cars per year.
The growth of the motor industry in these early years was astonishing. In 1904 there were already 8,000 cars, 5,000 buses and coaches and 4,000 goods vehicles on British roads alone. Motorcycles outnumbered cars in Britain from 1916 (153,000 motorcycles to 142,000 cars) until 1925, when the number of private cars caught up (580,000 cars to 572,000 motorcycles). After the Second World War, the production of cars increased at an even greater rate. By 2000 there were 23.2 million cars and 825,000 motorcycles on British roads.3
Worldwide vehicle ownership was uneven, of course, especially in the early years of the century. But by 2000, numbers had increased universally. In 1960 there were 411 private vehicles per 1,000 people in the USA, 266 in Australia, 158 in France and 137 in Great Britain, but only 49 in Italy, 25 in Israel, 19 in Japan and 8 in Poland. Comparable figures in 2002 were 812 per 1,000 people in the USA; 632 in Australia, 576 in France and 515 in Great Britain. In the other countries, the imbalance had shifted: there were 656 cars per 1,000 people in Italy, 599 in Japan, 303 in Israel and 370 in Poland. Non-Western parts of the world still owned fewer cars: China had just 16 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in 2002, India 17 and Pakistan 12. Altogether the number of cars worldwide increased from 122 million in 1960 to 812 million in 2002.4
The other huge shift in twentieth-century transport was the advent of air travel. The first heavier-than-air flight – not using gas or hot air to produce lift – was the result of the Wright brothers’ determined efforts. From 1899 to 1902 they experimented with the gliding aspects of flight before fitting a petrol engine and home-made propeller to their first Flyer in 1903. On 17 December 1903 Orville Wright took off – and covered 120 feet in 12 seconds. That is less time than it will have taken you to read from the start of this paragraph; nevertheless, those were 12 of the century’s most important seconds. The Wright brothers remained in the vanguard of the development of the aeroplane for a decade, and frequently risked their necks in tests to improve the stability of their machines. By the end of 1905 they had made a flight of 24 miles. By 1908 they had even carried a passenger. In 1909 a series of contestants lined up in France to compete for a prize of £1,000 to be the first to fly across the English Channel: a race that Louis Blériot won on 25 July.
During the First World War many governments invested heavily in the development of aircraft when it emerged that they were by far the best means of quickly reconnoitring the enemy’s advances and locating its artillery and naval vessels. But still aeroplanes were an unreliable mode of transport. Until the very end of the war they were too small and unsteady to be loaded with heavy explosives for effective bombing raids. After hostilities were over, the would-have-been bombers came into their own carrying long-distance post. And they finally breached the great barrier of the Atlantic. On 14–15 June 1919 John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew a modified Vickers Vimy non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland. It was another Columbus moment that showed people the future: one day they too would fly between continents. Indeed, that same year, the first commercial airlines started business, flying passengers from London to Paris and back. Governments sponsored national airlines, especially when the threat of foreign companies dominating the domestic skies became clear. The first regular transatlantic passenger crossings were, however, by German Zeppelin balloons. Not until 1939 did an airline offer a regular aeroplane service between America and Europe.
Technical innovations during the Second World War in aircraft design, radio communications and radar swiftly added to the safety of flying. Rivalry between American airlines created pressure for planes capable of delivering profit. The result was the 21-seat DC-3, which first flew in 1935. It was now possible to cross the North American continent in 17 hours; crossing the Atlantic took 24 hours. Consequently, demand for air travel grew dramatically. The number of scheduled flights by British airlines between 1937 and 1967 increased from 87,000 to 349,000 per year. At the same time, the greater capacity of larger planes meant that the number of people carried rose proportionally far more: from 244,000 to 12.3 million.5 In the 1970s ‘jumbo jets’ such as the Boeing 747, capable of carrying more than 320 passengers, further transformed the accessibility of flying. More and more people wanted to travel at the fastest speed possible, whether taking a domestic flight for work or going on holiday to an exotic island. And they also wanted to send goods and resources quickly around the world. Thus connections between different modes of transport were arranged for convenience: train lines were extended to sea ports and airports, airports were linked to major cities, and car parks were provided everywhere. The result was more or less the global transport network we have today.
The consequences of this transformation were huge – sometimes impressive, sometimes unsightly, and in some places traumatic. The world was commercialised, its political boundaries cut and re-cut by networks of trade and travel. Ancient balances of power were upset by flows of Western capital and forced to readjust. Countries that previously had not realised they had resources of enormous value – for example, oil and uranium – were able to export them. Nations that dominated strategically significant transport routes were able to exploit their positions. The wealthy sectors of resource-laden and geographically well-positioned nations became rich on an international scale. The poorer sectors often grew more affluent too, as their social superiors spent their surpluses at home as well as abroad. Most countries grew more prosperous as trade unlocked the resources of the world.
Number of passengers travelling through UK airports 1975–2000 (millions)6
All these transport links enabled machinery to be exported quickly and efficiently. They facilitated the distribution of artificial fertilisers and pesticides. They allowed agricultural surpluses to be shipped to markets in bulk. Any country that could afford to import produce was no longer vulnerable to harvest failure
. The effect on the world’s population was staggering. In the previous century it had grown by about 679 million – but 45 per cent of that growth had occurred in the developed world.7 The population of the non-European world, which had remained between 307 and 356 million from 1200 to 1500 and then only grown at rates of 31 per cent in the sixteenth century, 18 per cent in the seventeenth, 37 per cent in the eighteenth and 60 per cent in the nineteenth, suddenly saw a 342 per cent increase in the twentieth century. Trucks and lorries did not just support this staggering growth through the distribution of food, fertilisers and machines; they also facilitated the rapid spread of medical aid – especially antibiotics – to more remote places. In this way, transport considerably added to the wealth and well-being of the world. We should not forget, however, that there were also losers as a result of this interconnectedness. In times of plenty, countries with insecure food supplies were tempted to export their surplus food cheaply, for low levels of profit. However, when they experienced crises, they did not have the wherewithal to buy the necessary supplies at international market rates, which reflected the scarcity of food in the region. Some countries where life was marginal therefore still experienced food shortages and famine. Nevertheless, many places were able to reduce or eliminate their vulnerability to harvest failure. In 2000 a much smaller proportion of the world’s population was subject to periodic starvation than in 1900. The fact that in absolute terms there were more hungry mouths to feed was due to the fact that the world population increased dramatically – from 1.633 billion to 6.09 billion.
The transformation of the world’s transport network, led by the West, resulted in the export of much more than just capitalism and business suits. Most of the Western world saw its own secular, democratic, materialistic, egalitarian, morally liberal values as the very peak of civilisation, and sought to confer these on the rest of the world. Businessmen and politicians in developing countries realised that it was sometimes to their advantage to adopt Western practices – or at least to accommodate them. Rapid modernisation forced the citizens of these nations to go through the same process of skills specialisation that had taken place in Europe and America in the nineteenth century. Many non-Western countries were therefore forced to come to terms with the Scientific, Medical, Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions in the course of just a few decades. It is no coincidence that as transport networks widened, food yields increased, population expanded, urbanisation increased and literacy rose. In 1900 only 13 per cent of the world’s population lived in towns and approximately 20 per cent could read and write. In 2000 half the world lived in urban areas and over 70 per cent were literate. The whole world was forced to compete in a marketplace created by transport links and the movement of capital and goods. The only refuges from the march of capitalism were those nations where political barriers shut out economic competition, or the few countries where geographic barriers inhibited the advances of transport and global trade.
In an earlier chapter it was pointed out how transport was essential to the growth of a city. Obviously, food and other resources had to be transported into urban centres, and the larger the city, the more mechanised transport was necessary. Thus transport links were given priority over pedestrians, gardens, bicycle routes and individual living spaces, with dramatic consequences for our environment. By 2000 many people lived their whole lives in a metropolitan setting and rarely if ever saw what a rural region looked like, except in the cinema or on television. Half the world’s population lived in a cityscape, coping with noise pollution, light pollution and air pollution, constantly harassed by the speeding cars and vans, buses and bicycles, motorcycles and lorries that thronged the multi-lane arteries of every city. Even at night transport dominated the landscape, through the stretches of barren tarmac that divided the blocks of human existence and the lights that flickered from red to green. Finding tranquillity in a city was difficult and frustrating. Many large conurbations required their citizens to travel for an hour or more before they could see something resembling the rural landscape of their forefathers. Perhaps as a result, many people started not to bother. Where once Edwin Chadwick had found slums and social deprivation, people in 2000 found everything they wanted – for both work and home life – and saw no reason to leave.
Transport systems, by extending the hinterlands of cities, focus attention on their centres. In the twentieth century property prices in the most desirable locations soared. In order to accommodate as many people as possible in such sought-after areas, architects began to build higher and higher, especially in commercial districts. The tallest building in the world in 1900 was the 986-foot Eiffel Tower in Paris – a non-residential showpiece. The tallest inhabitable structure was the Park Row Building in New York, at 391 feet. By 1931 the highest office in the Empire State Building towered 1,050 feet above the streets of New York, with its famous observation deck another 174 feet above that. Many buildings of a similar stature followed. In 2000 you could look down from the 1,230-foot-high top floor of the Petronas Towers over Kuala Lumpur – only a little higher than the observation deck of the Empire State Building but also only marginally taller than a mass of other skyscrapers. In the 1970s the skyline to the west of Paris was punctured by the construction of several dozen buildings over 300 feet in the business district of La Défense. The tallest building in Britain in 1900 was the Midland Grand Hotel (263 feet) at St Pancras Station in London; in 2000, it was the capital’s somewhat taller One Canada Square (770 feet).
Transport transformed our social relationships as well as our physical surroundings. As explained in the last chapter, communities were progressively torn apart by the railways. The car inflicted further damage. The rise of cheap road transport between 1945 and 1960 killed off many local railway lines and left thousands of small towns with neither a market nor a rail link to the nearest commercial centre. Many people in rural areas were forced to live a more isolated existence or were increasingly dependent on their cars. It became difficult for older folk to continue to live in the homes they had known all their lives. They were forced into towns because they were too old to drive. At the same time, their grandchildren were forced to move to cities because they had to find work. By 2000 the majority of people in the West lived amongst strangers. Where once they would have known as many as 300 people in the three or four square miles around their home, now their kin and acquaintances were spread between many different towns and cities, often across the globe.
A similar process of estrangement took place between the providers of goods and services and their customers. In smaller communities, tradesmen were known to their potential clientele, and any failure to deliver was likely to result in damage to their reputation. In large towns and cities people could certainly draw on a wider range of suppliers but the weaker relationships between customers and the various businesses trying to undercut their rivals did not necessarily deliver the best service. When this point is applied to health matters, the difference is most telling. In a local community, where people had grown up together and lived among their own kin, the support networks for the ill and infirm tended to be much stronger than in cities, where community support was institutionally organised, expensive and impersonal.
Finally, transport not only delivered food worldwide and distributed the tools and equipment to farm the land more efficiently, it also led to agricultural specialisation. Global transport links forced farmers to compete internationally. Why should people in England buy wheat from hilly Devon if it could be shipped in more cheaply from Kansas? In order to maximise efficiency, farmers rapidly gave up the mixed farming they had practised since the Agricultural Revolution and concentrated instead on one form of production, such as growing wheat or rearing cattle. In America, intensive farming was practised after the mass production of the tractor between 1910 and 1920. In France, many regions were given over wholly to producing wine. In England, hill farms concentrated solely on meat production. By 2000 there was not one arable field nor a single dairy
farm in the whole 12 square miles of the parish of Moretonhampstead, even though agriculture was still the second largest employer (after tourism). All the farms produced only beef and lamb. For the first time in history, most countries in the developed world gave up the possibility of being self-sufficient for their food and imported at least some of their requirements from cheaper overseas producers. In the 1950s Britain produced less than 40 per cent of its own food.8 And this, of course, was the figure for the nation as a whole: urban areas were entirely incapable of self-sufficiency. Only when the country joined the European Economic Union in 1973 did its self-sufficiency recover, to over 70 per cent.
By 2000 the West was completely dependent on its transport infrastructure. Fossil fuels were required to operate the machinery that produced food for the nation and also to power the vehicles that distributed it. Every nation’s fate rested on the steady production of petrol and diesel in a dozen or so refineries (just seven in the case of the UK). It is a salutary thought that if we were to lose them now, despite all the improvements in food production since the Agricultural Revolution, the majority of the population of the West would face starvation for the first time in 200 years.