Man, Technology! The Path

The Overcoming of the Moors
Well-fortified roads linked the economic and religious centres of all the early cultures.Roads with wooden surfaces were in widespread use as early as the Neolithic Age, especially in marshy areas. What all these timber trackways have in common is a carriageway made of densely packed timbers running crossways to the direction of travel and laying across three to four longitudinal tree trunks. The oldest of these trackways date back to the Bronze Age.

Building such trackways, which often extend over political boundaries, require a great deal of effort: a detailed plan for the procurement of materials, transport, the actual construction work, provisions for the workers as well as the well-educated specialists.

It has been shown that wooden trackways like this one were part of a larger network of more permanent roads that reached all the way to the coast. So it was that, above all, they served the purpose of interconnecting local trade with longdistance trade and in doing so contributed to the development of the rural areas themselves.

New Routes for New Markets
The voyages of discovery that the Portugugise Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) organized along the West African coast represent the beginning of global maritime navigation by the European powers. Precise instrumentation became essential for secure navigation and for creating cartographic representations of the new worlds.

In order to establish bearings at sea and to find a path to their port of destination, seafarers lay an imaginary latticework over the earth and the oceans consisting of lines of latitude and longitude. Even without the benefit of experiential knowledge, this abstract grid is able to make the task of orientation in unfamiliar areas much easier. Latitude is ascertained by means of angle measurement.
The first measuring instruments developed for use at sea were the seamen’s quadrant and the mariner’s astrolabe. They were originally astronomical and surveying instruments that were then adapted to the conditions on board a ship.

A Shorter Way to Get There Faster
The desire to create a shortcut by connecting natural waterways with man-made ones is a very old one. The main problem confronting man-made waterways was differences in elevations - locks and ship’s hoists were developed as countermeasures. The narrow width of the canals was a further difficulty – in most cases the larger boats were not able to sail through them and they had to be poled or towed. Either people or draught animals, usually horses, performed this task with a maximum towing speeds from 1.5 to 2,5 kilometres per hour.

As early as 1839 a number of French canals employed steam locomotives, which ran right on the existing towpath, to do the pulling. The Around 1890, tests along the Oder-Spree canal were run with steam locomotive on a rail that had been placed on the towing path. The locomotive was able to pull seven loaded barges with a speed of seven kilometres per hour. In the end, however, electric locomotives became the preferred modus operandi.

Rails – The Way to Modernity
The introduction of iron rails came about more by chance than anything else. In 1767 Richard Reynolds (1735–1816), one of the directors of the ironworks in the Middle English village of Coalbrookdale, used production surpluses to cast plate shaped bars. These plates were then fixed to the upper surface of the company’s wooden rails.

The Sheffield colliery manager John Curr (1756–1823) Introduced L-shaped, cast iron angled rails in the 1780s and replaced the formerly wooden carts with fourwheeled iron wagons. Vertical ledges or plates served to keep the wagon wheels on the track. This method remained the basic construction principle for many rail systems until the invention of the wheel flange.

For a long time horses were used as the means to pull the wagons over the cast iron rails. Then, in 1804, as a result of a wager, a “steam horse” was placed onthe rails.

At the Right Place at the Right Time
Modern society has adopted the clock as the time indicator that is to be carried on one’s person and set according to the “official” time displayed on a public clock. Especially precise and accurate clocks, so-called chronometers, were first developed in the 18th century. They did serve as general timekeepers but were primarily used for marine navigation.

Industrialization had changed the lives of a large part of the population: The collaborative work of innumerable factory workers postulated, for example, not only coordinated action but necessitated common working hours as well. Timetables are another example of the new understanding. Time coordination and precision could at times be a vital concern because trains on tracks cannot take evasive actions. Each city, then, could no longer have its own individual standard time. Since April 1, 1893, the Middle European Time (MET) is the standard time in Germany.

„Get your motor runnin’ …”
Since the time of wooden trackways roads had constantly been undergoing changes in response to the new demands of travel. When greater capacity trucks became popular at the beginning of the 20th century it became necessary to build new roads. The idea of motorways, i. e., roads that are designed for motor vehicles only, took root in the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1909 the AVUS GmbH (automobile traffic and testing roadway) was founded in Berlin. The construction of a testing road also named AVUS began as early as 1913. Even if it was originally planned as a road with a pure bitumen surface, it soon justified its name as a testing track by interspersing different types of surfaces, one next to the other, including asphalt next to cast concrete next to hard-baked clinker bricks that were grouted with cement mortar. When the AVUS was completed in 1921she was the first road in Europe dedicated exclusively to motor vehicles.