Even more important, Vanderbilt and his contemporaries understood that the steam engine (or, to put it more broadly, motorized transportation) was the most dramatic technological breakthrough since the advent of the printing press at the dawn of the Renaissance. To move on water at will, against wind, tide, and current, was to transform a fundamental fact of life; to say that it marked a revolution is to give an overused word its proper weight. A practical education in steam would be worth a few days of taking orders.
