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Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population som
by iguy 7y ago
Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal wheels & rails to me, certainly not space-ship exotic. Although of course things continued to grow from there.
- oblio 7y ago> UK railways The keyword being "UK". We can include the US and a bit of Western Europe plus Japan. For much of the world a train was exotic even far into the 20th century.
- TomMarius 7y agoExcept for China you named most of the world population back then ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
- oblio 7y agoThat's a funny comment. The colonies had a smattering of railways, most colonial subjects probably never saw any railways or trains. Heck, for an example, look at how the African railway networks look in 2019 (!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union_of_Railways#/media/File:Africa_railway_map_gauge.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union_of_Railways#/med... And then compare that to the UK in 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britain#/media/File:UK_railway_map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britai...
- iguy 7y agoWait until you see the map of superchargers! This is an odd tangent, though, if you are interested in humanity's ability to do fine metalworking etc. and how this influenced what transport technologies were viable in what year. This isn't about rural backwaters, anywhere. It's reasonable to define mass adoption to mean that millions are using the thing, although obviously the first million will be in advanced bits of the world.