The Speed of Information

Via Beebo:

The book A Farewell to Alms is mostly about economic history, and specifically about how (in the author’s view) living standards were pretty stable and consistent for much of humanity until 1800, after which living standards increased dramatically in rich countries, and declined dramatically in poor countries, to the point where they are less well off than before 1800.

Anyway, part of this argument is a table showing how long in took for news of significant events to reach London. I thought this pretty interesting in itself–we’re not accustomed to news taking days or even hours to go around the world now, and even when reading history you usually get the impression that events were known immediately. (The dramatic speeding up of news reports around 1880 was a result of the invention and deployment of the telegraph.)

Event	Year	Distance (miles)	Days until report	Speed (mph)
Battle of the Nile	1798	2073	62	1.4
Battle of Trafalgar	1805	1100	17	2.7
Earthquake, Kutch, India	1819	4118	153	1.1
Treaty of Nanking	1842	5597	84	2.8
Charge of the Light Brigade, Crimea	1854	1646	17	4.0
Indian Mutiny, Delhi Massacre	1857	4176	46	3.8
Treaty of Tien-Sin (China)	1858	5140	82	2.6
Assassination of Lincoln	1865	3674	13	12
Assassination of Archduke Maximilian, Mexico	1867	5545	12	19
Assassination of Alexander II, St. Petersburg	1881	1309	0.46	119
Nobi Earthquake, Japan	1891	5916	1	246

It's interesting to see how long information took to move around the world in the 1800s, versus the instantaneous access we enjoy today.