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Since the invention of steamships distant countries have become like those that are near at hand.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship.

Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed.

The construction of extensive railways, however, and particularly the consolidation of small, experimental lines into large systems, dates from the days of the discovery of gold in California.

Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil disposed.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

Trade allegedly does not foster growth because when it begins, a flood of imports of factory origin destroys the handicraft manufacturing of the less developed country: the models for this are the effects of British exports of textiles and of iron in India and Chile in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Windows were the first thing we made ourselves. Other products, such as cement and plasterboard, came later. Some of the factories we actually built because of union blockades trying to stop us getting supplies.