Of timetables and tourism

I have been busy, cleaning up old books, so here's a bit of new stuff I have written for one of them. 

Despite what my publishers often assume, I am not really an historian. I do, however, write about historical matters, because like any good scientist, I am kin to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Kipling’s mongoose, who always had to “run and find out”. I want to know why things happened, and what made them happen as they did, and not differently. That is why I can argue that without the steam engine and the telegraph, Einstein may not have started the line of thought that led to special relativity.

It all began with a need to synchronise clocks, but nobody needed to do that until railways came in, and timetables were needed to make sure that up and down trains did not collide on the single tracks that were normal. (The single tracks between towns worked because train drivers would pull into sidings to let other trains pass. That is why they needed synchronised clocks and watches.)

Before long-distance railways, the only people who needed accurate times were those on ships who needed reliable time for navigation. The distance of a ship north or south of the equator, its latitude, was measured by taking sightings on certain stars, or on the sun, preferably at noon.

The harder task was finding your longitude, how far east or west you were. British sailors would set their chronometers by the standard time, as measured by the observatory at Greenwich. Using that as a basis, if the sun reached the highest point in the sky four minutes earlier than at Greenwich, you were one degree east of Greenwich, and if noon came four minutes later, you were one degree west of Greenwich.

Up until the 1850s, anybody with a telescope could set a ‘local noon’, but even in a small country like Britain, this system was no longer safe for the railways, and so Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in Britain.

An international convention in 1881 met to establish what we now know as the international date line as the prime meridian, but the convention had a majority of European members, and so the meridian through Greenwich became the standard for time-keeping, simply because it was closer to home for a majority of members. But if that meridian was the base line for timing, it still took more than 30 years for French and German geographers to accept the use of the Greenwich meridian as the base for all world mapping.

Einstein’s thinking about time arose from the needs of steam train drivers, but until the telegraph was available, synchronisation was hard. Without telegraphy, Einstein may not have pursued the deep problems of time and space.

Probably he would have got there, because trains and telegraphs were helpful precursors, rather than what scholars back then designated as sine qua non, a Latin tag meaning without which, nothing. There were many essential precursors like the invention of calculus, and probably a few enabling technologies.

In cities and towns, steam whistles, bells, flags and lights on towers indicated impending or recent arrivals and departures, summoning those to start walking who planned to meet (or be) passengers, and those seeking to send or collect goods or mail.

Timetables also fed tourism, the great leveller, that all too often pulls every culture down to the lowest common denominator, but which also opens the door to the acquisition of knowledge. Mass tourism corrupts, most of the time, causing hordes to rush from ticking Mona Lisa on their bucket list, to watching a “crocodile show” in Australia, or ogling the bare-breasted apsaras at Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat apsaras.

Along the way, though, one learns to drink rauchbier, or to put lemon in weissbier, to gain a degree of cultural perspective. Tourism also eliminates weak vessels, the ones who want to play with grizzly bears or lions, so it has its good points.

The idea of the Grand Tour began in the late 1600s, but as late as 1843, travelling from London to Rome took 21 weary days, though in 1860, steam ships and trains got you there in just two and a half days. In those earlier and slower days, when people went on the Grand Tour, they tried to tick as many boxes as possible, and after Pompeii was rediscovered in 1748, it went on the list of marvels to see. Seeing things like that helped educate people more widely.

The Mona Lisa crowd. This was as close as I wanted to go.

Just as the new technology brought fast travel to the masses, so Thomas Cook brought the masses to fast travel. He augmented the technology with group excursions, travellers’ cheques, hotel coupons and round-trip tickets, teaching first a nation, then the world, to obey timetables.

Cook began simply, arranging for a temperance group of 485 people to go from Leicester to Loughborough in 1841 at a shilling a head, with a brass band, speeches and food thrown in. He built up slowly, then left his job in 1845 to run tours full-time. By 1848, he was taking parties to Scotland and the Lake District, then ran ‘specials’ to see the Great Exhibition in 1851, and private trains to London to see the Duke of Wellington lying in state before his funeral in 1852.

Mr Cook’s train with 28 carriages of paying customers ran across Brunel’s magnificent Saltash Bridge when it opened in 1859. Ten years later, he was offering a 105-day tour of Egypt and Palestine, and one of his 1872 brochures is supposed to have inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days.

Verne seems to be one of the few writers of his time who was sensitive to how the world was shrinking. Cook offered a tour lasting a more relaxed 222 days but Phileas Fogg used timetables to find a faster way. In 1859, a New Zealander could reach London in comfort in 80 days, via Suez and Marseilles, but getting around the world in that time was still a bit of a challenge.

Some had more pressing reasons to travel, like dodging spouses or obligations. The classifieds in The Times on January 3 reveal that people could advertise for missing friends in Australia, while a New York enquiry agency offered to provide information about traders or to collect debts. In London, Charles Frederick Field, a former Chief Inspector of the Detective Police of the Metropolis, offered London and Continental Private Inquiries, and access to his New York agent.

Before about 1859, travel books were written either by intrepid explorers to recoup their costs, or as guides for intending emigrants. Now steamships made foreign travel more available, and Murray’s Guide to Madras and Bombay Presidencies for 1859 was the beginning of a long line of guides. The author was Edward Eastwick and the “Murray” who usually gets more credit was John Murray, the publisher of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Eastwick advised his readers that on arriving at Madras (now Chennai), the trick was “to get into a palankeen and be carried to the club, if a bachelor; or if travelling with ladies, to some friend’s house. There are, indeed, hotels which may be repaired to as a dernier ressort.”

Isabella Bird Bishop published her The Englishwoman in America in 1856. She became the first woman member of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892 and publishing still in 1900. She started when her clergyman father sent her to America to do research on American Christianity for him. A relative of William Wilberforce and cousin to John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1848 to 1862, she was well-connected enough to get an introduction to John Murray, who accepted her first work– and she never looked back.

After the death of her parents, she sailed for Melbourne in 1872, then visited New Zealand and Hawaii before crossing America and reaching New York at the end of 1873. There were more travels, and she circumnavigated the world three times, a record that few humans could have matched in the 19th century — and it was all down to steam transport. Steamships also carried an England cricket team to North America in 1859, the first international tour involving any team sport. England won every match.

Sometimes, travel failed to broaden the mind. An American visitor to Berne had returned claiming that everything in Berne smelled of cheese. “Cheese is the Bernese otto of roses”, he grizzled, using the then common version of ‘attar of roses’, an oil distilled from rose petals and still used in many perfumes. Every city had its smells, but the odour of horse dung was common to all of them.

But that's another story.