Travelers who get easily annoyed with delayed flights, unexpected cancellations and endless queues may had burst in fury back in 1914, when world travel was measured in days, not in hours.
In a recently unearthed isochronic map, isochrones or lines adjoining reachable locations that share the same amount of travel time, depict how people in the past traveled and how massive the changes are through time.
In the map, it can be seen how little the distance people can tread in a span of five days from London, England. For example, point-to-point travel within the dark pink region of the map takes that time to complete. An example of this five-day journey is traveling from London to Azores in the west or Russia's Perm city in the east.
If five days look excruciatingly long for travel, that's bad news. This is because according to the map, five days is the minimum time a person had to spend to travel back in the day.
The next legend at the bottom of the map is the light pink color, which indicates five to 10 days of travel from London. Sample locations under this category include Winnipeg in Canada or the Blue Pearl of Siberia, Lake Baikal. The map also shows that it can take as much as 20 days for people to travel to Tashkent in Uzbekistan or to farther Honolulu in Hawaii.
In some locations, the color is prevalent throughout a landmass, just like how pink stretches all across the United States, and orange in the entirety of India.
Other distances in days in the map legend include 20-30 days, 30-40 days and over 40 days of travel.
A blue obstruction may be observed not far from inland, just like in South America and Africa. The reason for this is the the development of railway systems.
By 1914, the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway was then nearing its completion. Soon, railway systems were well-established that travel times in U.S. and Europe have become significantly shorter.
"Isochronic distances...change with every additional mile of railway brought into use," wrote geographer L.W. Lyde in the introduction of the book where the map was originally published.
The isochronic map is part of the book "An Atlas of Economic Geography" by John G. Bartholomew, the cartographer royal to King George V. Also the heir of a family known to make maps in Edinburgh, Bartholomew made the 1914 book to aid schoolboys, young businessmen, traders, imperialists and travelers.
Aside from travel days, the book also features rainfall, topography and climate charts. Locations where supplies of raw materials such as rubber, rice or cotton are abundant were also mapped out in the book. Ultimately, young entrepreneurs were highly helped by this book as it also contains distribution of commercial languages, which was necessary to know which parts of the world are conducive for convenient market trade.
