If success in any one field has made America the world's greatest nation, it is transport and communications.
Before rail came, it was water transport which made America great, especially when steam supplied the driving force. Fulton went into the business of marrying steam to water transport in 1807. In 1811 he built a shipyard at Pittsburgh and launched the New Orleans, the first steamer on the Ohio.
No single fact of nature played a bigger part in American progress than the Mississippi. The Mississippi runs directly through the largest continuous area of high quality agricultural land on earth, and is the main artery of this richly productive basin.
The best book ever written about a river, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain.
Samuel Morse, originally an artist and professor of design in New York College, conceived the idea of an electric telegraph in 1832 and built a practical machine in 1837. A Washington-Baltimore line opened in 1844. It was first used that spring to transmit news from the Whig and Democratic conventions, which met in Baltimore, to the capital.
