What was the best way to spread information? Everything from news, gossip, and emergencies
In: 71
Many people are talking about how fast news spread but sometimes news *didn’t* spread from one place to another. For example when Pizarro invaded the Inca’s lands they apparently weren’t ready for him and his small army of horses and guns even though the Spanish had already conquered the Aztecs decades earlier. Even though it was only a few hundred miles away no one bothered to relay the warning or there was no line of communication in place.
And sometimes messages filtered through but they got garbled along the way by being translated and re-translated by different people and cultures with different goals and outlooks. [Here’s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCSZQj8yvD4) an ancient Roman talking about ancient China and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XdPodNwSGU) is an ancient Chinese person talking about ancient Rome.
I don’t know but when I was a kid every other kid in America thought that Marilyn Manson removed a rib to be able to suck his own dick, but we didn’t have the internet so how that got so widespread is a mystery to me.
It has varied through time:
Up until the 1800s, the fastest way to get news from place to place was generally having a guy ride a horse from point A to point B and deliver the news. Of course if point A and B were on different continents, then there would be sailing ships involved. News would usually take weeks to get long distances. Getting information from Europe or Asia to America could take months or even over a year. For really urgent news, the fastest method was using carrier pigeons, which were often used by armies to coordinate movements.
The speed at which information could travel depended largely on the political situation. During the Roman empire, there were safe and well paved roads throughout the empire, and organized mail service was quite speedy, delivering messages across Europe in a couple of weeks. During more chaotic periods, getting messages long distances reliably was flat out impossible.
When the telegraph was invented it really revolutionized the speed of communication. Suddenly urgent news could be sent hundreds of miles in a few minutes. For lower priority news, generally you could send a telegraph and be sure it would be delivered within the day. It took a while before telegraph lines were able to cross oceans, but that did eventually happen. Sending telegraphs was REALLY expensive, so most communication was still done by letter, which was carried by boat, horse or train. Postal service was a lot better back in the 1800s when it was the primary way information traveled. In most larger towns and cities, there were multiple mail deliveries per day, and local mail would be delivered the same day.
Telegraphs and Printing Presses were common enough since the 1830s. So phone calls and newspapers.
Before the telegraph? Depends completely on distance.
For correspondence of any kind, however long it would take for your mail to be delivered by courier (on horseback).
More complex systems were common as well tho.
Smoke signals are very effective over long distances. They were especially used by precolonial native peoples; Horses are a Eurasian Animal.
In some mountainous regions, whistled languages had developed, and someone proficient in them can communicate with other speakers from miles away (in good conditions)
I wouldn’t be surprised if some codes were developed to function with horn usage as well.
Telegraph was super fast at getting information arund the world and then it would be printed in newspapers. The pre telegraph era was alot slower. Think Pony Express.
“Nothing of much importance happened today.”—George III, Diary Entry, July 4, 1776
It took a bit for news to travel back then.
[The Victorian Internet](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/162040592X) is about the communications just before, during and just after the development of the telegraph.
Before telegraph and trains, it was mostly by word of mouth. Word would be spread to local news agencies and mass printed out.
It was…. slow. Very slow.
Let’s go back in time – because the answer varies.
Even before radio, near-lightspeed communication was possible with the telegraph. Message speed was limited to Morse Code – communication was measured in words per minute; but with the trans-Atlantic cables, you could communicate between Moscow and San Francisco in under an hour if the message *needed* to get there.
If you had a longer message, you would need to carry it. Trains across the US or Europe were going 60-80 MPH, and could carry just about any size of message/news/etc.; so a delay measured in days was normal. Traveling between Europe and America could take weeks, sometimes longer, depending on how fast a ship you were willing to use.
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Before trains and telegraph (which happened around the same time – and in the US, were often laid down together); horse messengers were the best you can do. Staged horse routes allowed fast horses to be run without regard to tiring the horse: about as soon as your horse was getting tired, you’d arrive at a waystation where they would trade horses, resting your tired horse for a fresh one; allowing either single riders or stagecoaches with teams of horses to go near full-horsespeed, which could easily be 30-45 MPH; ridden 8-12 hours/day, especially if you could trade riders/drivers as well as horses – getting 250-300 miles/day.
Without staged horses, you’d be limited to a horse’s daily pace, which is closer to 100-150 miles/day; or slower as you go farther back in history (because less specialized horse breeding had had time to be done). By Roman times, it was actually faster in many cases to use a runner – a human, trained to run long distances. Roman and earlier runners could run 100 miles/day; which limited how fast you could get messages.
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However, there’s a second part of your question: spread. Radio pretty easily spreads information in every direction – horses, boats, and runners don’t. There’s cases of battles in wars happening weeks, even months, after the war ended because news of the end didn’t get to the people in that battle. If you were off the main lines of communication, you might get news days, weeks – or in some cases, even years after news happened. You see this a lot in the decline of the Roman Empire: Britannia in particular dropped out of the Roman Empire because by the time anyone in Rome could respond to anything in Britannia or vice-versa, it was too late to do anything; but the same thing was true in various backwaters everywhere in the empire.
kind of along the same line is the time of day. every city would have its official time and could be off by alot. if using a sundial for instance Columbus Ohio 20 to 30 minutes behind New York.
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