Wolfgang Schivelbusch The Railway Journey

“space was both diminished and expanded.” Things moved across spaceįaster, and simultaneously, more space could be accessed. Perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble.”Īnd what is the machine ensemble? “heelĪnd rail, railroad and carriage, expanded into a unified railway system… one

Was experienced as “denaturalization and densensualization.” WithĬuttings, embankments, and tunnels”the railroad was constructed straightĪcross the terrain, as if drawn with a ruler.” Now “the traveler Schivelbusch’s is a wondrously powerful insight.Įnsemble,” Schivelbusch explores the ways the development of the railways Investigation into the Laws of Thought (1854)– the concept of binary Logic that I am familiar with focus on English mathematician George Boole’s An Most histories of the computer’s binary-digital

Watch a demonstration of a piston (in this Possessed a binary-digital logic all its own.” Was no longer the analogue of any form of movement found in nature but “placing a piston in a cylinder and applying the pressure of steam… tĭid not transfer an existing form but forced a new form of power out ofĬombustible matter.” Moreover, “the piston’s up-and-down movement Other words, the technological Crossing of the Rubicon, as it were, was I had missed the more important point of the invention preceding it.” In Writes: “It took me forty years and the Digital Revolution to realize that In his new 2014 preface, however, Schivelbusch Words, transforming the up-and-down movement of the steam-driven piston Rotary motion, “a kind of mechanization of the mill race.” In other Of the steam engine– and ultimately the railroads– was the introduction of In the steam engine, the prime mover of industry, these two combined to produce energy in theoretically unlimited amounts.” The Industrial Revolution, generally seem as having begun in the the last third of the eighteenth century, was a complex process of denaturalization… Iron became the new industrial building material, coal the new combustible. “Next to wood, water and wind power were the main energy sources of pre-industrial economic life. With a detailed discussion of the history of the steam engine. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch opens My sense of this is a compression of time and a curious elasticity of space of oftentimes disquieting and othertimes most welcome transparency and that constant pull to the little screens that, so it would seem, we all feel these days, whenever, wherever. There are indeed many parallels, however, to start with, t he literature on Far West Texas is exponentially greater and– more to the point– since the time I was traveling in Baja California, the experience of traveling itself has been radically transformed by the Digital Revolution. In recent weeks, this question of machineĮvolution, to my surprise, has begun to interest me intensely.Īt first I had thought of this book I am writing about Far West Texas as a doppelgänger to my 2002 memoir of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air, for the ecosystems and early exploration and mission histories of these two regions have many parallels. Points along / on the same trajectory of machine evolution?” Originally published as Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, the English translation came out in 1979 I read the 2014 edition with a new preface, “World Machines: The Steam Engine, the Railway, and the Computer,” in which Schivelbusch asks,Īccelerator of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer occupy different Of late: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German historian and scholar of cultural studies.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch The Railway Journey