Transportation and Communication

Abstract

When I first noticed a chapter in a copy of the Statistical Abstract of the United States called ‘Transportation and Communication’, I thought that it was a strange pair of topics to combine. The more I thought about it, however, the more sensible it became. There’s a sense in which transportation is a kind of communication and vice versa. Transportation implies movement of some sort, the movement of something to something else. But without some type of movement there can be no communication. Sounds, signs or signals are the vehicles of communication, and they must be exchanged if there is to be any communication at all. Going in the opposite direction, without some kind of communication, there can be no transportation. But the sense of the term ‘communication’ involved in this case is different from that requiring signals. The communication that’s necessary for transportation is simply a kind of interaction of transported and transporting entities from some place or state to some other. What made the idea of action at a distance incomprehensible to physicists from Democritus to Newton and Maxwell was precisely that it seemed to involve movement without anything touching (physically communicating with) anything else.¹

“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

Samuel Johnson