
A Two-Miles-per-Hour World: the speed that news traveled to Venice, 1500 to 1765 - benbreen
http://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/301ModernEurope/Space-Time%2016thC.html
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benbreen
I should add that this submission was inspired by the discussion yesterday
about the 1914 map of travel times from London:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10647586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10647586)

Fernand Braudel is one of those people who specialists in a field all
recognize as a revolutionary figure but the general public doesn't seem to
know about. In my view he's probably the most influential historian of the
20th century, not least because of his innovative way of thinking about data
visualization and mapping. His work ended up leading to some very early
experiments with what we now call digital humanities among his various
acolytes in France and the US, back in the punched card era. Interesting guy.

Edit: forgot to mention a famous bit of lore about the book these maps came
from - he actually wrote the original draft of it when he was a member of the
French Resistance imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp.

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mannykannot
The degradation of service from some areas (particularly France and the
Iberian peninsula) between the second and third maps is interesting. I guess
that it was a consequence of deteriorating political relations (the War of the
Austrian Succession, perhaps?)

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cafard
An interesting point: but the distances over land don't vary that much. I
suspect it is insecurity of sea travel between Italy and Spain, but from what?
Anglo-French conflict, North African corsairs?

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awqrre
A 1TB drive going 2 miles in one hour would still be a decent transfer rate.

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Florin_Andrei
Over what distance?

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meric
Trade off between (physical space = delivery cost, ping) and bandwidth. A suit
case can easily fit 20 1TB drives. A 20 hour journey from Sydney to London,
would mean a transfer rate of 1TB per hour, or 2000+ megabits per second, or
300x faster than the internet in my own home. Even carrying only 1 terabyte
over 20 hours is a decent 111 megabits/second.

