Man’s common transportation until the automobile was the horse and buggy. Few remember the time before cars and expressways. The speed of transportation has increased from the horse to 24,000 mph in space!

Automobiles

The first U.S. gasoline automobile was invented in 1885. By 1900, only one in 9,500 Americans owned a car. Today there are over 600,000,000 cars, trucks and buses in the world! Americans spend over $91 billion on new cars alone! And $43 billion on used cars! U.S. auto plants produced 6.0 million passenger cars and 5.7 commercial vehicles in 1996. [Japan produced 7.8 million passenger cars and 2.4 million commercial vehicles.] The U.S. has over 3.9 million miles of public roads! Private automobiles carry 80.5% of all intercity traffic.

The world’s car population has grown five times as fast as the human population over the last 50 years. In 1950 there were 53 million cars. Today there are over 600 million cars.

In the past 100 years, man has increased his travel from 30 mph to space shuttle speeds of 17,500 mph, or five mps. 

The fastest escape velocity from Earth was 34,134 mph, achieved by the ESA Ulysses spacecraft in 1990 enroute around the poles of the Sun via a fly-by of Jupiter.

Railroads

The U.S. railroad industry began in 1826 with the horse-powered 3-mile-long Granite Railway used for hauling stone. By 1860, over 30,000 miles of railroad track had been laid; by the 1880s, over 70,000 miles of track. Although railway passenger travel continues to decline due to automobile and airplane travel, double stack freight trains carry containers across the continent. Automatic Car Identification, a nationwide computerized network, provides a system for quickly locating rolling stock. In 1979, Japanese trains using magnetic levitation achieved a speed record of 321.2 mph.

Air and Space Travel

In 1918 the first U.S. airmail service began. By 1926 U.S. airlines carried just under 6,000 passengers. Today, commuter air traffic is growing 6% to 10% a year, with over 1,315,269 passenger arrivals and departures worldwide in 1996. In 1982 U.S. air travelers spent less than $15 billion. Today, over $25 billion is spent on air travel.

The Space Age began with the launching of the first satellite, Sputnik, October 4, 1957. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission landed the first men on the moon, watched by live television audiences on Earth. The astronauts reached 24,791 mph during their flight. The first space shuttle flight took place on April 12, 1981. By 1995, 65 flights had been launched. From 1957 to 1993, there were 3,569 successful space flights worldwide.