The History of Travel When humans first decided to travel, all they had to use was their feet. Considering this was true, they really got around. Once they invented a simple boat traveling got even faster. It also allowed us to travel to more distant places. Over the years the simple dugout canoe became something else. It turned into a multi-oared device. We also discovered the fact we could ride atop animals after they were trained. It makes me wonder how we decided to use the horse, the elephant and some other docile animals. Did we try other animals first and fail? Did somebody try to ride a tiger or a lion and was the outcome very unpleasant for the passenger? Can you just see it now, someone decides to get on the back of a hippopotamus thinking it is a docile animal only to find out it is one of the most fearsome animals of all? Once we found out we could ride a horse or even an ox, some smart people figured out how to invent the wheel and with this wheel they can improved traveling among other things. They developed chariots and then wagons which increase their comfort and even made longer journeys easier. Inventors of the day looked at travel and decided to try and use the wind to speed things up. They developed the sail, and as years went by the ships carried more and more of them, making it possible to harness even more wind. This enabled sailors to explore the earth. The ancient Greeks had discovered steam power but somehow had failed to realize what they really had, so almost for 2000 years that discovery was never applied to transportation. It is said the first useful steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, but even this engine was not use for transportation but as a pump to take the water out of mines. Eventually, steam engines began to appear on the newly invented train and in ships. They were used as the power source for driving these conveyances. Today we have many different types of engines for ships but even some of the very advanced ones are used to create guess what? They are used to create steam. I am talking about nuclear reactors aboard what are usually military ships. Other ships are mostly powered by diesel engines. Some submarines have backup electric engines. When we finally developed automobiles the very first one from a few hundred years ago was steam powered. Going into production automobiles were electric or use combustion engines. The combustion engine became the favorite and was the one that appeared in most automobiles but this began to change and today we are seeing a resurgence of electric cars and trucks. There is also a hint these vehicles may not be what we ultimately drive. I say this due to the fact there is a lot of research going on into hydrogen powered cars and in the future, we may be able to run our automobiles on water. This brings us to the airplane. We started out using gliders but since they have no power, they were not practical for travel so it wasn’t until 1903 when the Wright brothers invented the first airplane, which allowed us to think about practical air travel in the future. Some people before the Wright brothers thought they could develop steam powered airplanes this never worked out. By the time you would have a vehicle with a heavy boiler, a heavy water tank and coal, these things would be too heavy to get off the ground and even if you could, they wouldn’t be able to fly very far or take on many passengers. The combustion engine changed all this for air flight. Planes began to improve. They used propellers to fly into the sky and drag the plane through the air. The very first commercial airline flight took place in 1914. It was a scheduled flight. It traveled between St. Petersburg Florida and Tampa Florida. The plane was a seaplane. As planes advanced, they exchange their prop driven motors for jet motors and the speed at which these planes traveled was far in excess of the older planes, and it was now possible to fly around the world in fifty-one hours. The Concorde had done it in thirty-one hours and twenty-seven minutes. It looked like the way to travel the fastest was by airplane. Not everyone was convinced of this however and some people believed that even though the planes were fast you still had a drive to the airport which could take quite a while depending on where you lived and when you arrived you had a drive to your destination. All this added the time for traveling. I guess there is no denying this, and I can tell you sometimes I have spent hours just driving to the airport in heavy traffic. They believed the answer was the train. A new source of propulsion was developed for the train and it was called magnetic levitation. As these trains were being developed, they did have some problems in the beginning, but those problems seem to have been overcome. The train’s work by opposing magnets in the track and underneath the train are able to lift the train slightly above the track, reducing friction and using the power of magnets to propel the train by turning them on and off at a rapid pace. These trains began to break speed records and some of them became very famous such as the Japanese bullet train. We now have a new development; the Chinese are building a magnetic levitation train which they have just said is faster than going by plane. No, the actual speed is not faster than a plane but you might save a lot of time traveling to the train instead of the airport and from the train to your destination. The Chinese claim the actual speed of this train will reach 373 miles per hour. This is not the only type of train which is being envisioned however. Elon musk the famous inventor of the Tesla car and head honcho of SpaceX is proposing a train which gets sucked through a tunnel by a vacuum. Before the New York City subway system was built, an inventor had proposed a more primitive one of these trains, but Boss Tweed, and infamous politician in New York stopped it, because he owned some of the surface transportation and thought this would hurt his income. It is being said by some the train would travel at 760 miles per hour and would truly be faster than a commercial jet flight today. It will be amazing to see what the future will hold in travel, but I can bet one thing, it will have to be a lot faster than anything I talked about today to reach other worlds.
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