History repeats itself. If we can predict how the world-wide-web will transform society we may situate ourselves directly in the path it will grow. One way to gain perspective on the impact of the internet is to look at the development of similar world changing inventions. By focusing on some of the principles that defined the Industrial Age, perhaps we can understand more about whats happening today in the Digital Age. The development of steam engine and the development of the search engine bear interesting comparisons.
In November 2006 NetCraft, a UK firm that monitors the Internet announced that the World Wide Web now contains over a hundred million websites. Furthermore, analysts believe the net should reach two hundred million domains by 2010 and could grow exponentially larger by 2015. A good reliable unbiased search engine has never been so important. How else will humanity ever find what they are looking for?
On November 7th, 1885 Donald Alexander Smith the Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal hammered home the last spike in the first Canadian transcontinental main line at Craigellachie B.C. in the Eagle Pass. Sir William Cornelius Van Horne made his famous fifteen-word speech, "All I can say is that the work has been well done in every way". They were standing on almost 2,753 miles of track that had been laid across the Dominion of Canada. What none of the men around them knew was that the Canadian Pacific Railroad was critically short of good reliable steam locomotives. The firm had only a dozen engines of their own, and half of these were so old they were not considered capable of hauling anything beyond their own weight up (or down) the very steep 4.5% gradient of the Kicking Horse Mountain Pass. There was a steam engine shortage in Canada and all over the world in the 1880s and the historic Robert Stephenson & Co. foundry in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England (which had been contracted to provide at least two more engines for CPR) was absolutely swamped with orders. In July 1886 Stephenson had promised two hundred and nine units to various railroads all over the world. By 1899, his four horse shop had built over three thousand steam locomotives. For the purpose of our comparisons, he was the Google of his day. He had a good reliable product that delivered results, even under the most severe conditions or steep inclines.
In the same way corporations race to get online today, in the 1880s nations all over the world were anxiously building railroads. Steam driven rail transport was the respiratory system of the Industrial Age and simply put it breathed in raw materials and exhaled money. The steam engine itself was the high technology advance of the day and over a period of about fifty years it changed the entire world. The railway regulated the flow of goods like no other mass transportation system in existence - it siphoned surpluses and fixed deficits overnight. Steel rails created markets where none had existed before, and by 1900 this improvement had revolutionized every sector of society, ferrying goods and passengers for commerce while forever changing agriculture, manufacturing and military mobilization. The search engine, on the other hand, is the respiratory system of the Digital Age and it will do all the same things, but in different ways.
