Preconditions for Transformation 523

to German health spas and casinos, whose clientele a century earlier had
been limited to princes and noblemen.
Yet some contemporaries already feared the environmental costs of the
iron tracks and black soot pouring from locomotives. Fearing for nature,
the British poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) denounced the plan to
build a line into the Lakes District: “Is then no nook of English ground
secure / From rash assault?” In the 1870s the English writer John Ruskin
(1819-1900) lamented railways that “slashed like a knife through the deli­
cate tissues of a settled rural civilization.... Your railroad mounds, vaster
than the walls of Babylon, they brutally amputated every hill on their way.”
Yet after mid-century the use of steel rails, more powerful locomotives, and
innovations in engineering eliminated enormous excavations and earth­
works, meaning less damage to the landscape.
Speed—at least relatively speaking—was also brought to rivers and
oceans. In 1816, a steamship, combining steam and sail power, sailed from
Liverpool to Boston in seventeen days, halving the previous best time for
the journey. Steamboats, which began to operate on Europe's rivers in the
1820s and 1830s, revolutionized travel and transport. By 1840, the trans­
port of Irish cattle and dairy products to England alone fully engaged
eighty steamships. A constant procession of steamships traveled the Rhine
River from Basel, Switzerland, to the Dutch seaport of Rotterdam.
At the same time, the contribution of improved, paved roads to the Indus­
trial Revolution should not be forgotten. Here, too, the story of European
economic development involved continuity as much as innovation, remind­
ing us that in some significant ways the Industrial Revolution was based
upon an innovative expansion of technologies and ways of doing things that
were already in place.

The Great Western leaving Bristol in 1838 for its maiden voyage to New York. Steam

power reduced the trip to nineteen days.