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The Railroads | James Sud

jamessud.github.io · 416 words · saved by 1 readers

The invention of spreadsheets was necessitated by the boom of railways in the 19th century. Before neatly gridded cells, columns, and rows, trains scattered freely through the lands of America, taking bullet paths through vast space, sometimes colliding with each other and sublimating from metal to gas, so that scattered across deserts and prairies were little campfires, right on the wood and metal tracks, amidst millions of acres of darkness. As nobody tracked the trains, nobody tracked the campfires. Every day, more trains would lurch in and sear themselves in the flames, and burst and explode, feeding the little campfires. Throughout the decades, writhing, swelling infernos spread across American badlands and salt flats, pouring brown carbon into the upper troposphere. Eventually, at some point in the 19th century, the entire American railway system – all million miles of interlaced track and deforested wood and hot rolled steel – was on fire. Yet the prospectors, investors, and rai

The invention of spreadsheets was necessitated by the boom of railways in the 19th century. Before neatly gridded cells, columns, and rows, trains scattered freely through the lands of America, taking bullet paths through vast space, sometimes colliding with each other and sublimating from metal to gas, so that scattered across deserts and prairies were little campfires, right on the wood and metal tracks, amidst millions of acres of darkness. As nobody tracked the trains, nobody tracked the campfires. Every day, more trains would lurch in and sear themselves in the flames, and burst and explo

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