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ILLUSTRATION: The Opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 by J.R. Brown. Originally published in The Graphic, 13 Oct. 1888. Source: Wikimedia.
Notice the relative balance between the train and the landscape and the absence of any effect suggestive of rapid movement or higher-than-previously-experienced speeds. Neither trains nor steamships had as big an impact on society’s identitarian paradigms, like the car. They did revolutionize transportation and opened new globalized economic markets, they affected the use of the military (transporting troops, artillery, supplies) and paved the way to new forms of imperialism, but they were not “individual technologies”, both because they required an infrastructural network to run and a plural crew to be operated, and also because they did not support the construction of a new social identity, at least not in the way the car did later on and for much longer.
The reasoning behind that distinction is that if you buy a ticket for a train or a boat trip, you must be someone who has already planned to travel somewhere, and is executing a plan based on their own desire and the availability of trains or ships for a certain destination. The buyer of a car, on the other hand, was seen as someone whose entire premise in life had changed. The constant availability of the car creates opportunities rather than helping realize pre-existing plans.
In fact, the destination itself becomes secondary, and the established practice of just “cruising” in a car turns into something much more expansive and socially disruptive than the previous bourgeois routine of going for a carriage ride to relax, interact with peers and be seen in public places.
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ILLUSTRATION: Britannia-line hybrid steamship (1840), which could cross the Atlantic. Source: Wikimedia.
Cassier’s Magazine of December 1893 had an article at pages 83-95, describing “Fast Ocean Steamships”. Among the illustrations included in the article there was this, showing the historic steamer Britannia, on page 90. Notice that passengers and sailors on the bridge of the ship are barely visible.
