Evolution Of Travel 1800s

The Evolution of Travel in the 1800s In the 1800s travel was much more difficult then what we experience today. With the rapid growth of America and people pushing west, there was a great demand in new and alternative modes of travel besides walking. Thomas Jefferson (The third President of The United States) knew that the American people wanted safer ways to travel so, he proposed a system of roads, manmade rivers, and rail roads. The dream that Thomas Jefferson had to connect Americans ushered in the modern ways of transportation that we use today. By around the middle of the 1800s dirt roads connected most of the nation. This was great for Americans who wanted to travel across the country with a speed coach. New and more sophisticated

The water ways where dominated by steamboats. John Fitch invented the first steam engine in 1769. “His first steamboats demonstrated the viability of using steam for water locomotion and made way for the Steamboats of the 1800s.” Robert Fulton built the first steamboat and is considered the Father of Steam Navigation. “The forerunners to the Steamboats of the 1800s were the flatboats. The flatboats, or 'flats' were important forms of transportation for the new nation carrying produce to markets and occasionally transporting passengers.” Flatboats became obsolete because they could only move downstream while the steamboat could go faster downstream and could also go upstream. “The invention of steam power made it much easier to travel along the rivers. The steamboats had a steam engine which turned a paddle wheel in back of the boats. Some steamboats had two paddle wheels on each side of the steamboat which could then reach even greater speeds. These paddle wheels powered the steamboats both up and down river.” Steamboats could travel at a max speed of five miles per hour. Steamboats had three decks. The main deck is where all the cargo was stored. All of the crew’s cabins where on the boiler deck which also held the steamboats engine. The top deck was also called the hurricane deck. This is where the captain’s quarters were and that where the

This car ran on a steam engine and was very slow. Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir was the first man to build the one cylinder engine. Later Nikolaus August Otto built the four- cylinder engine. In 1886 Gottlieb Daimler designed the first four wheeled automobile. There was also a great development in the electric motor in the 1800s. It is hard to determine who invented the electric car. It was a series of inventions that led to the first electric car. In the early part of the century inventors in the United States began researching the concept of a battery-powered car and created small scale versions. Around the same time Robert Anderson made the first basic electric car. It was not until the 19th century that French and English inventors built some of the first practical electric cars. In the United States the first successful electric car made around 1890 by an inventor named William Morrison. William Morrison was a chemist who lived in Iowa. His vehicle could hold six people and had a top speed of fourteen miles per hour. This vehicle helped make people notice electric vehicles. In a few years, electric vehicles started to be manufactured by many different automakers. New York City had more than sixty electric taxis. By 1900s, electric cars were the most popular way to travel on roads. Around a third of vehicles on the road where