Editing Industrial Revolution (section)

==Transportation==
In 1800, if you wanted to get from point A to point B your options were limited. You could always walk, in which case you might be able to cover maybe 50 kilometers a day at 4kph if you're in good health and traveling light. Catching a lift on a farm wagon was about as fast, but it's not you doing the walking. If you had the cash, you might use a stagecoach, drawn by a team of horses which were regularly swapped out and could go along at 13-16kph if the roads were good (and that's a big If). A sailing ship might be able to match that speed if there was favorable conditions (and that was a big if) and would be on the move 24 hours a day. Most people of the period lived their whole lives without going more than 30km from their birthplace; travel was the domain of elites, the wealthy, merchants and their associates, and armies on the march. While there had been refinements (some of which were fairly substantial, especially with ships) this basic set-up had been the case since the Bronze Age. But this ancient order would soon be overturned by steam power.

First there were steamboats with experiments starting in the 1700s in Britain, France and America. It was a fairly straightforward idea: take a boat, slap a steam engine in it, hook it up to a paddle wheel and hope that nothing catches fire or blows up. By the early 1800s there were some steam tugboats. By the 1810s there were paddleboats handling cargo on canals and rivers. By the 1820s there were experimental steamships which could cross the Atlantic mostly using engine power and by the 1830s there were regular transatlantic crossings. The big advantage of a steamship over a sailboat was that it could sail straight into the wind without giving a shit. Voyages that could take months at full sail could be done in a week. Even so sailing ships still persisted for some time in some roles as they did not need their coal bunkers topped off all the time.

Self-powered ships were a big deal for maritime trade, but on land something new rolled down the lines. Steam locomotives started put hauling carts in English and coal mines, then upgraded in 1826 to moving freight and passengers. In 1829, Stephenson's Rocket managed to achieve the ''amazing'' overland speed of 48 kph. Things only escalated from there. By the 1830s, there was a full blown railway boom in the UK as rail lines snaked their way over the British Isles and their colonies. The US followed soon after, then the French and gradually the Germans, Spanish, Russians, Italians and so forth got in on the game. For the United States in particular railways shaped the cultural landscape of the country. Chicago and several other cities went from podunk towns to major cities thanks to their use as a rail hub and expansion of the rail network west was a key tool in settling the frontier. The same applied to Canada with the Canadian Pacific. The big American rail companies also became massively powerful [[Megacorporation]]s in the modern sense. In the latter of half of the century, trams and trolleys began to emerge for use inside cities, providing the forerunner to modern public transit services.

From moving Iowa grain and bananas from Havana to the European market to sparking the beginnings of tourism to the creation of the first suburbs, both steamships and railways transformed national economies and the ways people lived and worked. They also changed warfare. Steamships could easily outmaneuver and outrun pure sailing vessels; on land trains could easily move soldiers and supplies in huge numbers.

This was also the time when humanity first took to the air. The first hot-air balloons appeared in the late 18th century and were gradually refined. In 1852 the French built a hydrogen balloon with a small steam engine, allowing the operator to move it about as he wished. Further experiments were made through the latter half of the 19th century with lighter than air flight. At the same time, inventors began to work with gliders to achieve heavier than air flight. Despite the claims of a few derpy dorks forever consigned to be laughingstocks that heavier than air flight was impossible for humans, the Wright Brothers managed to achieve powered flight in 1903.

=== Communications ===
Similarly communications made quantum leaps ahead. When the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution, you sent a message long distance by writing it down and giving it to either a courier on horseback or a ship. This meant that it would take months for news to get from China to Britain and vice versa for the reply. 

The first optical telegraph system was built in 1793, and the French Empire under Napoleon greatly expanded this network and made good use of its ability to transmit signals across great distances. The electrical telegraph evolved during the same time period, but the British and French initially ignored it because they thought the optical system was just fine. This didn't stop inventors from refining and perfecting the device, and the first commercial electric telegraph came online in 1837, with widespread adoption occurring shortly thereafter. Undersea cables were laid across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific, connecting the world for the first time. Early versions of telex and fax machines used the technology as well. Interestingly enough, the Telegraph was in some ways like a proto-internet. It was operated by a network of users which formed their own community with romances, chatter and memes, users contrived elaborate systems of coding to convey lots of information with a few words and while people could make massive amount of money off it either by running companies or getting up-to-date information on world potato prices it was also a prime vehicle for fraud and other such skullduggery.

In the 1890s came Guglielmo Marconi and wireless telegraphy, which quickly became the standard comms equipment for ships and is the main reason anyone survived the sinking of the ''Titanic''. Alongside this came the discovery of radio waves, which went quickly from experimental technology to cheap, mass-produced sets. The telephone was also invented in the late 19th century.