Let Us Consume Mass Quantities

MORNING RUSH at the WORLD'S BUSIEST AIRPORT - Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Plane Spotting
Alex Praglowski Aviation

I watched another similar video not too long ago and it gave me a feel for just how massive the airline industry is. Normally all you or I hear about airlines is when one particular airplane has some kind of trouble, or about how many zillions of dollars a particular company made or lost, but neither of those things really gives me a feel for what's actually going on. One airliner, while large, complex and expensive is still just one airplane, and a zillion dollar profit or loss is just some abstract, imaginary number. But watching these big, expensive aircraft take off, one after another, endlessly, I start to get a feel for the situation.

Stu Savory got me started this morning with a comment on an earlier post:

I went on board the SS Great Britain once; beautifully restored, an old slave-trader ship harboured in Bristol UK. It has a steam engine too, a HUGE V2, the bore and stroke are each about 2 or 3 meters !!!

(the Wikipedia article has only one mention of slaves and that's in a footnote. We'll come back to that.)

SS Great Britain Steam Engine

Right off the size of the engine grabs me. It's big, so I go looking for pictures. I'm finding all kinds of photos, but none that really show the whole engine and how big it is. That's because it's contained in a room just big enough to hold it, never mind that the room is big enough to contain a small office building. You can't get far enough away to get a view of the whole engine. Bah. Lots of models and mockups and such though. You work at it and you can build an image in your mind. Don't know if you can really get a 'feel' for the size of it without being there.

Anyway, I'm reading the Wikipedia article and I come across this line:

On 22 December, she rescued the crew of the British brig Druid, which had been abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, that's cool. That ought to be a pretty good story behind that. Let's see what we can find. Hmm, seems there were several HMS Druids over the centuries, but none that fit the bill, so maybe it was a commercial ship, so I do some more looking and I find this incident mentioned in a List of shipwrecks in December 1872. WTF? There's like 600 of them, that's 20 a day. Can you imagine if we had 20 airliners crashing every day, day in, day out? That is roughly equivalent to what was happening. Okay, most of them were probably cargo ships, but sailing cargo ships carried a crew of a dozen or so, and the cargo and ship had substantial value. 

As for slave ships, slaving was big business back in the middle ages. Britain outlawed slave trading in 1807. The SS Great Britain (1845–1886), after being rebuilt and refitted a couple of times, spent 30 years transporting colonists to Australia. Australia was started as a penal colony, but that was back in 1788, but fifteen years later there was a real colony.

Meanwhile, I've started reading The Verge, a history of European exploration from 1490 to 1530. The book starts talking about Columbus and his voyages to the new world. I heard all about this when I was a kid, but my teachers didn't talk very much about how his expeditions were financed. The Verge attempts to correct this oversight. The money men got together and financed these expeditions because they wanted to make more money. They had seen the stuff coming from the Far East and knew there was a boatload of money to be made if they could just get around the middle men in the Mid-East. So they started sending ships to look for opportunities. In Africa they found gold and slaves. In North America they didn't find much except people they could enslave, at least at first. Eventually after the pushed further in Mexico and South America they found huge quantities of gold and silver, but that was later. At first there was nothing but a bunch of natives fishing from canoes.

Note: Title from Coneheads sketch on Saturday Night Live.

Update next day: Alt Fin Next Level has a new post about slavery.