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