Let’s travel back in time to explore the ways humans got around together (on land) from prehistoric times to the first taxis in the late 1800s. Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi begin this excavation of transportation history where it all started: with our own two feet. With the development of trade and cities, the hunter-gatherer mode of movement was inadequate for a species that needed to expand and travel. From the invention of roads to the primitive sleds known as travois to the all-important wheel to horse-drawn carriages to railroads and the first taxis, human civilization has come a long, long way in how we hitch a ride. New episodes every Tuesday from March-June.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype Link: claritype.com
Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude.
-- Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
Let’s travel back in time to explore the ways humans got around together (on land) from prehistoric times to the first taxis in the late 1800s. Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi begin this excavation of transportation history where it all started: with our own two feet. With the development of trade and cities, the hunter-gatherer mode of movement was inadequate for a species that needed to expand and travel. From the invention of roads to the primitive sleds known as travois to the all-important wheel to horse-drawn carriages to railroads and the first taxis, human civilization has come a long, long way in how we hitch a ride. New episodes every Tuesday from March-June.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype Link: claritype.com
Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude.
-- Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
- Okay.- Alright.- Hi.- And then the, you're-(people laughing)- One more time.(light music)- You're listening to-- "Keyboard and Quill."- From StarTree, creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit.- And podcast. Hey, I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- This is "Keyboard and Quill." Today we're gonna talk about how we got to ride sharing.(cars honking)(dramatic music) You know, Rachel, I was in Krakow, Poland a few years ago. I was speaking at a software conference called Devoxx Poland.- Color me shocked.- I know, and my airfare was substantially cheaper if I flew back on a Sunday instead of a Saturday. And the show was over on Friday, and I thought, hey, you know, this works. So I brought my drone and I made plans to visit a castle that was about an hour from the city. I wanted to take some pictures of the castle.- That that might be the most Tim thing I've ever heard you say."So I brought my drone."- Yeah. This is close to peak Tim. I got an Uber to a car rental place and rented a car, went on my way. And this is rural Poland now, meandering through these insanely random country roads. And I was just thinking, there is no way this happens without a GPS-enabled smartphone with relevant mapping data in it. That experience wouldn't have happened.- And I take it you don't read Polish.- I do not. I do not, no.- So taking out a map wouldn't have really helped much.- I mean, I'm saying the nature of these meandering country European roads, I think would have gotten the better of me.- Yeah, I tried using the vaporettos in Venice, the little boats that take you from place to place. I have never gotten more lost in a city. And I actually can read some Italian.- My guess is Uber doesn't operate on the canals there, but anywhere else, if I'm in a city that Uber operates, that's basically what I do. You know, if I'm in the US, I might use Lyft. Lyft doesn't generally operate internationally. Pick up my phone, use the app, call a car. Payments settled through the phone. It's kind of a wonderful time to be alive.- Yeah, the hardest part is usually finding the pickup place at the airport now.- Yeah. Now we're both old enough to remember when it wasn't like that.- Yeah.- So how did we get here? Let's take another trip through time and look at transportation and how we end up with ride sharing.- So is a time machine a form of transportation here?- Yes it is. We're gonna turn the clock back again. And before we jump in, we're just gonna look at land travel, okay? Airplanes, air travel, amazing history. Boats, extremely important. But to try to keep things limited, we're gonna be focusing on how people get around on land and really mostly on cities. There's gonna be a lot of roads, a little bit about automobiles, a little bit about rail.- You're still talking, but I'm in this time machine, and I've set it to that 40,000 years ago with our cave painting from the first episode. And we're going to look at how hunter gatherers moved.(device reeling) They just walked under their own power. They brought with them whatever they needed to survive. Cost of transporting goods was pretty high.- You had to carry it.- Yep. And if they were in wander mode- that would be a really good
iPhone mode:
wander mode.- Wander mode. Yeah.- Yeah. So they walk to follow game, chase or retreat from an Ice Age. I don't know how fast they would've done that.- Right, right, right. That makes it sound like that's coming.- Yeah. Here it is. There's the ice. Anyway. Or to respond from pressure from the migration of other groups that they may not get along with.- Right, right.- Some enemies. It was about escaping threats and following resources. There was no there to get to. Only to stay fed and un-attacked.- Right. Now, in order to have a road, there needs to be a reason to get from one place to some other place. Once you've got cities emerging, 10,000 BC, you need roads between cities and then some kind of street structure inside the city,'cause you, you want to get from here to there, and there's usually this economic motive for that.- Makes sense.- Now, the first known vehicle is this thing called a travois. It's really just two big sticks that you make a triangle out of. You tie 'em together at one end and attach that to your horse and drag the other ends on the ground and load some stuff up on the sticks. And those show up about 10,000 BC.- Well, now I understand where the cybertruck's designed came from.- It's a throwback to the first known vehicle, which shows up right when cities do, you know, way of dragging stuff between cities.- And about 5,000 years later in 5,000 BC you got evidence of sleds, which seemed to be a tick up from travois. A sled is a little harder to build though, but a lot easier to pull.- Yeah, 1,000 years later, 4,000 BC we see the first paved roads showing up in the Indus Valley civilization, a Bronze Age civilization in the Indian subcontinent and a little to the north and west.- So the wheel is an important part of travel. And when does that come onto the picture? In about 5,000 BC, but we're not quite sure where. The traditional answer is Mesopotamia. But there's a good case for Eastern Europe and the good old Proto-Indo-Europeans.- Wheeled carts around 3,000 BC. So finally that good old travois can be put to rest. Spoked wheels don't show up until around 2000 BC. It's interesting how late that was. That was a tough idea to come up with. And you know, there are civilizations that never had the wheel. Okay, the Incan Empire, famously: no wheel. Iroquois Confederation up in North America, settlements, roads, sophisticated organization, but no wheel. Roads are still valuable, right? Still a lot easier to walk on a road, lead pack animals on this improved path, even if it's just a dirt road. And so once you have all these roads, at some point they're complex enough that you can't keep 'em all in your head anymore. And then there are new people, maybe some person who's new to the land, or a young person just growing up. You have to show them how to use these roads.- It sounds like we're gonna need maps.- Yes.- So when do we get them in like the sense of the Rand McNally Road Atlas? We'll answer that after a short break.(upbeat music)(upbeat music continues)- I'm Tim Berglund.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- This is "Keyboard and Quill." We're gonna map our way to the origins of ride sharing with a crucial element of human history: cartography.- So actually the first known roadmap is in 1150 BC in Egypt. That is the Turin papyrus map drawn for Ramesses IV, which shows all the roads in the Egyptian Empire. In 500 BC in Persia, you've got an organized highway system. So this was a central government that was planning out a road system.- The Greek historian Herodotus, he was writing in the fifth century BC, so not too long after the Persian Road network was kicked off, has some things to say about this.- There is nothing that travels faster and yet is mortal than these couriers. It is said that there are as many horses and men posted at intervals as there are days required for the entire journey. And neither snow nor rain, nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swifty as possible. The first courier passes on the instructions to the second, the second to the third, all the way through, just as the torch bearing relay is celebrated by the Helens in honor of Hephaestus. The Persians call this horse posting system the Angarium.- And now, Rachel, we know where the motto of the US Postal Service comes from.- I was just gonna say that sounds very familiar.- Yes. There you go. The Romans were notoriously good road builders, right? And they started around 300 BC.- But funnily enough, though Romans didn't use maps. This is probably due to the size of the empire and the fact that images are not particularly easy at this point to print and carry around. So the Romans leaned into what we now see as a very modern male stereotype that said, "Maps? we don't need no stinking maps."- Okay now, I thought the stereotype was that men are good at maps.- Just not good at asking for directions.- There you go. That is definitely the stereotype.- Anyway, so we just needed to know what is between where we are and where we want to get to. So in about 44 BC, the famous Julius Caesar and Mark Antony commissioned the Itinerarium, which was a list of every town on every road in the Roman Empire and the distance between them. That was engraved on a chunk of marble and smacked down in the middle of Rome near the Pantheon. So travelers could copy down their itinerary before setting off to the far reaches of the empire, most likely to do some excellent tax collecting. This is still a long way from Google Maps, but it's generally the same idea. So modern roads are definitely still inspired by the Romans, but we owe our modern highways more to the Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam. He developed an inexpensive paving material of soil and stone aggregate known as macadam.- Where'd he get that from?- I have no idea. A later edition paved the Macadam with tar, thus tarmac.- That's funny. Tarmac comes down to us now as the thing you call the runway.- Right! Yes. I didn't even think about that, but yeah.- Yeah, let's remember that the impulse for roads is trade, okay? We're getting from place to place, you know, sometimes maybe to go see family, but at this point travel is still difficult and expensive and dangerous. You're probably traveling for trade. And so roads are fundamentally economic infrastructure.- What happens if we wanna move goods faster from place to place? We're not just okay with walking things or putting things on horseback.- Yeah, at this point, our time machine has taken us to the early 1800s, and this gets us to rail,(train horn blasts) which turns out to be a much more efficient way of moving stuff. So number one, you put wheels on tracks, then you've got automatic steering, right? You build a track and the thing is gonna go where you say it, you don't need a driver to steer it. And they're also lower friction. I saw one estimate that says a train uses a third of the energy, like per unit mass and distance, compared to a truck. So yeah, this is like semi-truck versus rail contemporary things. So yeah, it's 3x more energy efficient, which makes sense as a trade off, right? You're building these expensive rails, they gotta be good for something.- But like so many other things previous, we took steam and applied it to these carts. And in 1784, out comes the first steam locomotive that was developed by none other than James Watt. But you don't really have a commercially viable steam locomotive until Richard Trevithick, an English engineer in 1804, running on steel rails at an ironworks in South Wales.- There you go.- Anyway, rail quickly caught on in Europe and globally, this was the first practical and widely deployed mechanized travel that used steam instead of metabolic power of your legs or horses. But by the late 1800s cities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas were all reachable by rail.(dramatic triumphant music)- The Watsons live in a big city. Just now, Bobby and his father are coming to the station in a taxi. Some passengers arrive on foot, some in cars, and some by bus. The bulletin board shows what time each train should arrive and leave, and whether it's on time or late.(train horn blasts) The huge locomotive sets the train in motion. The road is clear. Through the railroad yards the train travels slowly.- Now, we were talking about the formation of cities and we said, cities wanna trade with each other. They need roads. That's kind of where roads come up. But I also mentioned how inside a city, there's one thing going on at one part of the city, another thing going on, maybe there's like all the blacksmiths are here and all of the folks who make dyes are in a different place.'Cause their process is stinky and you want it to be, you know, kind of contained whatever.- And you wanna avoid the river between the blacksmiths and the stinky dyers.- Exactly. So you need a way of getting around within cities, not just between cities, but within them. And that's worth digging into. Let's listen to a perspective on this from a documentary made in 1941.- In all United States, about half of the people live in cities and their suburbs.(bright music) Between these cities has grown a network of transportation arteries to carry men and goods in a steady flow of commerce. In the mornings, Manhattan acts like a heart and draws in the workers from their homes in the surrounding areas. The streets become filled with crowds of workers and shoppers. Then in the evening, the workers stream home again. And so we see that the main job of transportation in the city is to carry people between three points: where they live, where they work, and where they play. In New York City, people have a choice of several arteries of transportation. Certainly the most important means within the city is the subway. In the early morning, there is heavy subway travel followed by a slackening. In the late afternoon, there is a second rush returning workers to their homes. At night, the load grows lighter and lighter, and one can find a convenient bus line almost anywhere in the city. Buses are slower than the subway, but they offer the pleasure of being able to see store windows and the people of the city as they work and play.- Do they still have buses in New York, Rachel?- Yes, they do.- They do. Okay.- I think so.- All right. It's been a few years since I've been there, but I don't remember.- No, they definitely have buses.- Okay. New Yorkers, please leave correction in the comments. Now, I was in New York a few years ago, I think it was 2019, and a British friend of mine name's Robin Moffatt observed looking down a long straight street, maybe it was Broadway, I don't know, but you could see a mile or two down. He's like, "Ah, that's just so American." and- Grids are very American.- Yes! Yes. And like, it's not that I didn't know that, but I didn't realize the feeling, you know, he, as an Englishman is like having this experience of, this is what America cities feel like, you know? And he's absolutely right. There really are kind of two kinds of cities in the world. American, and well, everybody else. And there are like-- Like a few other things that come to mind.- Yes, yes. Generally American cities are relentlessly cartesian. There's a grid, there's long straight streets. There are exceptions, but that's the pattern, right? If you go to Chiang Mai, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Paris, Istanbul, Lagos, you don't see grids.- So for example, you plucked young Rachel out of Los Angeles in 1999 and you dropped her in the middle of London, and told her,"Here's a car, go to Manchester." I had to use a book called the A to Z, which definitely did not contribute to a small car crash on a B road, somewhere in between. And I'm also personally enamored with the US interstate system, which was not entirely designed without the thought of needing to transport materials across the country in case we were at war.- Yeah, it was the original bill had the word defense in it.- Right.- Yeah.- So thank you, Eisenhower. And as much as I would love to nerd out about how they're named and organized, I will leave that to you, dear listener, and your relationship with Wikipedia.- I might just take you up on that.- I think you should. An interesting point is that if you know your whole life is getting around that city, or more likely just a small area of that city, a human mind can learn to navigate these pathways trivially. But if it's a big barrier to entry for a new adopter. Like me in England, or like that trip that Tim took to Poland to see that castle.- Absolutely. The point is that if you just spend your whole life in a section of a city with this bizarre network of little roads, you learn it, it's fine. But we struggle with that. And well, you know, we'll come back to this point of navigation,'cause it's, I think, interesting to look at how getting around in cities evolved. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break to keep the lights on, and when we come back, we'll hail a cab.- At the tone, please record your message.- Hi, this is Thomas from Tempe, Arizona."Keyboard and Quill" is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit, an annual conference that brings together professionals in the data space to discuss harnessing actionable insights from real-time data. Join us to learn, teach, connect, and have an amazing time with the best community in the user-facing real-time analytics world.- Register now at rtasummit.com.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is "Keyboard and Quill." We're gonna continue our show about the origins of ride sharing with the ever recognizable taxi cab.- Cabs emerged in London in 1621. That's when the first documented Hackney coach shows up. Hackney probably for the region of London that it came from, and coach for the kind of vehicle that it was the big thing with four big wheels and a few people sitting inside and a driver on top. The idea here though was these were getting around city streets. This is how you get from place to place in a big city, not between cities. The first known taxi regulation is in 1662.- The government always wants its piece, doesn't it?- You know, guess there were some problems. They wanted to be seen as doing something. So Parliament made a law of 1662 setting a maximum number of licenses to be issued in London. Kinda like New York City taxi medallions. That's-- Totally, yeah.- Oh yeah. It's good to have friends.- So let's fast forward to the early 1800s in a smaller, less expensive vehicle called the cabriolet appears. It was a two-seat carriage, one driver and one passenger, pulled by a single horse. In 1834, this was optimized by a guy named Joseph Hansom under the name a Hansom cab.- Huh? What a delightful name.- Yeah.- Imagine Junior High was fun for him.- It was really cleaned up a lower center of gravity, but more of an evolution. And surprise surprise, these all transition from horsepower to machine power. We had a few dabblings in steam powered cars, but really was the internal combustion engine that allowed Karl Benz in 1885 to create the first production run of a gas power car called the Benz Motorwagen.- Ah, it has become a product, not just a tinkerer-made-a-thing.- Exactly. And I think it's a product that ended up having some good product market fit. I think it took off.- It seemed to, yes.- Yeah. And just as a side note, we actually saw the first battery powered electric taxis in London in, guess, 1897, long before gas powered ones. But they were too heavy and the batteries didn't last long enough and they didn't last long as a business. There was no Electrify America or Tesla supercharging stations around.- Yeah, so proto Teslas in London before 1900. That's amazing. Yeah, so maybe it's a little early for successful electric vehicles, but you do have, in that same year, 1897 gas powered cabs showing up in Stuttgart, Germany. I think the first agreed upon appearance of that kind of thing. In Paris, you got gas powered cabs in 1899. London, in 1903. And New York City, at least as an American, you think of that as capital city of taxi cabs, 1907, relatively late.- Do you think they were yellow?- I don't know. But here's a question, Rachel, where did the term taxi come from? We have cabriolet, and I get cab from that, but-- Right. There was this mechanical metering device to measure fares developed by a German guy, Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn in 1891, so this is back a little bit before the gas powered cabs, and it's called a taximeter. And cabs powered by taximeters became taxi cabs.- So taximeter cabriolets.- Taximeter cabriolets, if you want to potentially get beat up. Yes. And now we just say taxi or cab. And if you're in New York, you can maybe still say hack without sounding too old timey. That sounds early 20th century to me. I don't know if you'd be broadly understood, but yeah, there we are. Anyway, I think this is a great place to conclude this first part of our exploration of land travel because there's still so much more to come. Many thanks to Dr. Brian Taylor from UCLA and Darren Delay of DoorDash. You could find links to their work in the show notes. Also, thank you to Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude. It's available on Spotify and Apple Music.- Our show is produced by Peter Furia Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund. It was written by Tim Berglund- And Rachel Pedreschi. It was edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia. And our amazing original music and sound design were created by Jeff Kite of The Voids.- "Keyboard and Quill" is made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit. Register now at rtasummit.com.- You can subscribe to"Keyboard and Quill" for free wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Please leave us a comment and a rating if you have a minute. And if you're a data professional, you should check out the Real-Time Analytics podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday. Link in the show notes. I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- See you next time.(bright music)(bright music continues)