Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

by Vaclav Smil

Jetliners had eliminated shipping as a commercial option within a decade, one of the fastest epochal transitions on record. The first wide-body jet, Boeing 747, had entered the service in 1969, making it impossible to resurrect any regular large-scale ocean-borne traffic. Starting with the Mayflower, average crossing speeds increased by about two-thirds during the two centuries between 1620 and 1820. First steamers more than doubled it, and by 1952 the SS United States (with 66 km/h) was nearly 20 times faster than the Mayflower. Compared to the sailing time of some 960 hours during the 1820s, flight time of less than eight hours is two orders of magnitudes shorter, an overall reduction of 99.2%. If it ever comes, affordable supersonic travel could reduce the transit (as did the wasteful, expensive, and abandoned Concorde) to just over three hours.