JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post #121
Continuing to leaf through the George Cram Family Atlas of 1903 I came across another small fossilized statistical nugget that I know would be of value to some poor person out there: this one is a half-page of mail delivery times to about 200 places world-wide. (I know that this would be helpful to some historian, as I just went through a similar process for some data that I actually needed, finding a series of representational maps showing the frontiers of travel time for different modes of transport over different periods of time leaving from New York, and representing several decades’ differences—these were an enormous help to me, and I was unaware that such data had been compressed so elegantly; trying to piece this information together piecemeal would have been a very time consuming effort.) (This image is clickable for a magnified view.)
So in keeping with some of the other data-posting tactics of this site (for example the atomic bomb chronology and the bibliographies of various scientists as found in these pages) as well as on my business site I‘ll continue to make posts for some of the particularly scrumptious bits that I find during the day.
And just for the record, the longest in-transit period for mail that I have seen thus far in this table is for New York to “Gabun” (Gabon), Africa, coming in at 47 days; Saigon came in a close second with 44 days, and Hong Kong, 43. It still took 8 days to get a letter from NYC to London in 1899. The record for an east bound crossing of the Atlantic in 1958 was still three days, twenty hours, set by the Queen Mary in 1938, so getting a letter delivered in London after only nine days (including the passage plus processing and foot delivery) was pretty fast there at the turn of the century. Speed is a simple matter of relativity and perspective--and starting with a given known.
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