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]
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