Time, Convenience and Consequence: From the Railroad to the 3D Printer

Read Gleick 125-143, about early networks, and write a blog entry. If you want to write a stock answer the following question: Gleick writes early in the chapter that in 1849, "already railroad time was telegraphic time" (125). Why was this so? How did the invention of railroads lead to time zones? What are the implications of differences in the velocity and magnitude of transporting information and transporting things? Are those differences today getting larger or smaller, and what do you see as the effects of that trend? Find at least one Web link that supports your opinion and quote it and link to it in your blog post.

In my own opinion, the reason that our consideration of time changed with the invention of railroads was due to the speed of travel and the ease you could now reach destinations that might have once taken a day to travel. With this invention, you could go from one town to another with ease, but then the problem arose of standardizing time – on one hand, the speed and regularity of trains made it easier to arrange to see people in other towns, but without a standardized form of time you still couldn’t really make an exact appointment. For example, a clock in person A’s town might say his train will arrive in person B’s town at 2:40, but when he got there, person B’s clock might say 3:13. Might as well just say “I’ll see you…at some point this afternoon, hopefully.” Standardizing time with the invention of the railroad solves this problem.

In terms of the velocity and magnitude of transporting information and things: at one point they were equal, both things and information could only travel as fast as the person delivering them. But information developed an advantage of speed after awhile, as early as the fire beacons during the Trojan war – a coded message is weightless, and can travel much faster and farther than a person carrying a physical object. 

Over time, the velocity and magnitude of both information and things has increased steadily, but I say that information still has the advantage over physical things, and the difference between the two continued to grow over time. Take the telegraph vs. the railroad for example – both were phenomenal breakthroughs in the fields of delivering information and things, but the telegraph had the advantage I think in both speed and magnitude. And if we look at today’s technology, this difference is even more apparent: For example, if I ordered an item from China on Amazon, I could have it in about two weeks or so. Pretty impressive, but not nearly as instantaneous as the email notification I received from the company to inform me that my order was placed. 

However, I hypothesize that the size of the difference between the velocity/magnitude of delivering information and things has reached its peak, and now the gap will begin to grow smaller, and that the delivery of physical objects will grow to become quicker while the delivery of information stays more-or-less the same. 

One supporting idea for this hypothesis can be seeing in the recent craze for developing 3D printing. Ordering items could one day be as simple as placing an order from your computer/smart phone/talking watch/whatever, and then instantly being able to print the item from your own printer. 

The velocity and magnitude of 3D printing, if it could ever become a commercial technology for the common consumer, would be fantastically convenient. However, already people are considering the potential dangerous consequences of 3D printing, such as the danger of being able to print weapons. The Department of Homeland Security feels that the ability to 3D print guns would be difficult to control access to, and impossible to regulate. (Source) 

Like with digital music and information, because this would be such a strange and new way of being able to access physical items, no one is quite sure how to regulate it yet. Unlike if someone illegally downloads a song though, there could potentially be quite dangerous consequences to the wrong person printing a gun. So it seems that this particular method of increasing the convenience of transporting physical items should be treated with more caution than increasing the convenience of delivering information.