| Title | Nick Szabo on Metcalfe's Law and the Last Mile - 250 Years Ago | |
| Date | Wednesday October 22 2014, @06:51PM | |
| Author | azrael | |
| Topic | ||
| from the retrospective dept. | ||
Modern-day Renaissance man Nick Szabo de-constructs the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1830. Szabo organizes his short essay around the theme of inventions improving trade routes and supply paths to mines and farms; along the way, he points out a couple analogies to the Internet age.
Horse-drawn carriages and wagons had been in use in north-western Europe since the Middle Ages. During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, this mode of transportation was optimized through improvements to wheels, tires, shock absorption, and roads. It then became economically feasible to build out canals and navigate rivers to haul the cargo long distances, with horses used most heavily for "the last mile", e.g. transport of materials and goods from mines and farms.
Efficient bulk transportation is needed all the way between the iron mine, the coal mine, and the smelter. Because the cost per mile of water transport was so much smaller than the costs of land transport, this “last few miles to the mine” problem usually played a dominant role in transportation economics, somewhat analogous to the “last mile” problem in modern cable networks.
"Metcalfe's Law" - the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users - also came into play, as inventions and improvements to land transportation spurred investment in sea transport, and vice versa.
Metcalfe noticed Szabo's essay.
Bob Metcalfe @BobMetcalfe
Nick Szabo on Metcalfe's Law (one of my favorites) and nothing less than the Industrial Revolution
The first paragraph of the essay contains several links to past essays Szabo has written on related subjects.
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, Nick Szabo on Metcalfe's Law and the Last Mile - 250 Years Ago on 2024-04-25 09:41:48