Number of words: 450

Then in 1829, came the railroad, a product truly without precedent, and it and it forever change economy, society and politics.

In retrospect it is difficult to imagine why the invention of the railroad took so long. Rails to move carts had been around in coal mines for a very long time. What could be more of use than to put a steam engine on a cart to drive it, rather than have it pushed  by people or pulled by horses? But the railroad did not emerge from the cart in the mines. It was developed quite independently. And it was not intended to carry freight, on the contrary, for a long time it was seen only as a way to carry people. Railroads became freight carriers 30 years later, in America. (In fact, as late as the 1870s and 1880s it is the British engineers who were hired to build the railroads  of newly westernized Japan designed them to carry passengers – and to this day Japanese railroads are not equipped to carry freight.) But until the first railroad actually begin to operate, it was virtually unanticipated.

Within 5 years, however, the Western world watch engulfed by the biggest boom history had ever seen – the railroad boom. Punctuated by the most spectacular bust in economic history, the boom continued in Europe for 30 years, until the late 1850s, by which time most of today’s major railroads had been built. In the United States it continued for another 30 years and in outlying areas – Argentina, Brazil, Asian Russia, China – until the first world war.

The railroad was the truly revolutionary element of the industrial revolution for not only did it create a new economic dimension but also it rapidly changed what I would call the mental geography. For the first time the origins of ordinary people expanded. Contemporaries immediately realised that a fundamental change in mentality had occurred.(A good account of this can be found in what is surely the best portrayal of the industrial revolution on society in transition, George Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch.) As the great French historian Fernand  Braudel pointed out in his last major work, the Identity of France (1986), it was the railroad that made France into one nation and one culture. It had previously been a congeries of self-contained regions, held together only politically. And the role of the railroad in creating the American West is, of course, a commonplace in US history.

Excerpted from Pages 6-7 of ‘Managing in the Next Society’ by Peter Drucker