What was the best way to spread information? Everything from news, gossip, and emergencies
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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.
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